Obsidian HackerNews

The plugin periodically fetches and displays top stories from HackerNews in an Obsidian pane. Some of the best stories, blogs, news, and resources are shared on HackerNews, and this plugin helps stay updated while using Obsidian.

Features

• Periodically fetches a random top story from HackerNews.
• You can save the story as a note allowing you to revisit it again.

Installation

Through Community Plugin

• Open Settings (default: ctrl + ,),
• Open Community Plugins from the left sidebar,
• On the right pane, click Browse, this will open up all the Community Plugins
• Search for HackerNews
• Install the Plugin by clicking Install
• Enable to Plugin by clicking Enable

Enabling the plugin

• Open the Command Palette (default: ctrl + p),
• Search for Open HackerNews and run the command.
• You will see that a new View appears in the right Sidebar of Obsidian.
• Drag and drop like any other pane and power-up your Obsidian.

Is this plugin for you?

This plugin is for you if you use Obsidian and

• are a passionate engineer
• want to discover amazing articles, resources, and projects
• want to stay updated with the happenings in the tech world

Why I created this plugin?

I love reading technical articles and stay updated with the latest happenings in the tech world, and I find HackerNews ideal for this. I have read some of the best articles and found amazing open source libraries through it, and hence I always like to keep a clock eye on HackerNews.

On Mac, I used YCombinator Plugin on BitBar, which is very similar and shows one top story from HackerNews in the top menu bar. If the title is enticing enough, I can always learn more about it by clicking the item. This is a great way for me to discover the best resources out there.

Recently, I switched to a Windows machine and found it not having a similar utility; plus, writing a widget for Windows is a mess. When I discovered Obsidian, I found myself using it quite frequently. So I thought of creating a plugin similar to the YCombinator Plugin to fetch random top story from HackerNews and show it to me in the side pane.

This is how this Plugin was conceptualized, and now my Obsidian workspace looks like this.

Privacy

This plugin makes calls to the following APIs to fetch the top stories from HackerNews

• https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty
• https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json?print=pretty

The API calls are mere GET calls that do not pass any client-side information through the API to hacker-news.firebaseio.com.

About me

Hello, I am Arpit Bhayani - a CS Engineer, Educator, and a Polymath. I love everything around Computer Science, Programming, Mathematics, and Art. You can find me on Twitter, tweeting mostly about nerdy stuff.

In January 2020, I started my newsletter, where I write and share an essay about Distributed Systems, System Design, Programming languages internals, and deep dives on some super-clever algorithms. The newsletter currently has close to 2000+ subscribers.

I have been running a niche Cohort-based Course on System Design to help engineering become better at designing scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available systems.

You can choose to support me in everything I do by sponsoring this plugin.

Local Plugin Development

• Clone the repository in .obsidian/plugins directory
• In the cloned directory run, npm install
• Run npm run dev to start a dev server watching the source files
• Restart the Obsidian and now you would see HackerNews plugins under Installed Community Plugins
• Switch on to enable the plugin
• When you are actively developing and want to see your changes, just turn off and on the Plugin