Parses hn homepage and counts article with small scores so you can have a better idea of when is a good time to post.

hn-watch.py

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- 
import sys
import codecs
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

page = requests.get('http://news.ycombinator.com/')
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text)

soupPosts = soup.find_all('table')[0].find_all('table')[1]

posts = []
current = {}

class Post:
  position = ""
  title = ""
  author = ""
  points = ""

  def __init__(self):
    pass
    
  def __str__(self):
    return "{} - {} - {} - {}".format(self.position, self.title, self.author, self.points)
    

current = None
  
for tr in soupPosts:
  tds = tr.find_all('td')
  if (len(tds) == 3):
    current = Post()
    current.position = tds[0].text
    current.title = tds[2].text
  if (len(tds) == 2):
    if (current):
      if (tds[1].find('span') != None):
        pointsString = tds[1].find('span').text
        m = re.search('[0-9]+', pointsString)
        current.points = int(m.group(0))
      else:
        current.points = 0
      if (tds[1].find_all('a')):
        current.author = tds[1].find_all('a')[0].text
      else:
        current.author = ''

  if (len(tds) == 0):
    if (current != None):
      posts.append(current)
    current = None
    
    
# Pro-tip: A good time to post to HN is when at least 2 front page articles have scores less than 15, one of which has a score less than 5.

lessThan5 = 0
lessThan15 = 0

for p in posts:
  print p
  if (p.points < 5): 
    lessThan5 = lessThan5 + 1
  if (p.points < 15): 
    lessThan15 = lessThan15 + 1
  
print "Articles with score less than  5 points: {}".format(lessThan5)
print "Articles with score less than 15 points: {}".format(lessThan15)

if (lessThan5 >= 1 and lessThan15 >= 2):
  print "It's a good time to post!"
else:
  print "This is not a good time to post!"