# HackerNews Sample Workspace

This tutorial demonstrates how to build a Curiosity Workspace using data from HackerNews. You will learn how to model the data, build a connector, and create a custom interface.

The HackerNews workspace indexes stories, comments, and users. It uses the HackerNews API to fetch real-time data and maps it into a graph structure for advanced exploration and search.

The workspace uses a graph model to represent relationships between different entities:

• Nodes:
  • Story: Represents a post (id, title, url, score, time).
  • Comment: Represents a discussion point (text, time).
  • User: Represents a HackerNews contributor (id, karma, created).
  • SubmissionType: Categorizes posts (e.g., AskHN, ShowHN, Job).
• Edges:
  • Author: Connects Story or Comment to a User.
  • Parent: Connects a Comment to its parent Story or Comment.

The connector is built in C# and follows these steps:

1. Fetch: Retrieves top stories from the /v0/topstories endpoint.
2. Transform: Converts JSON responses into strongly-typed C# objects matching the graph schema.
3. Ingest: Uses the Curiosity Library to add or update nodes and relationships in the graph.

Example snippet for creating relationships:

var storyNode = graph.AddOrUpdate(story);
var userNode = await graph.CreateUserAsync(authorId, ...);
graph.AddEdge(storyNode, userNode, "Author");

A custom front-end built with Tesserae allows users to navigate the dataset:

• Sidebar: Custom navigation for top stories and trending users.
• Node Renderers: Custom views for Story and Comment nodes to display scores and threaded discussions.
• Routing: Deep-linking to specific stories or user profiles.

You can find the full source code for this sample on GitHub:

• HackerNews Connector
• HackerNews Front-End