Show HN: LaptopHits.com – see what laptops people are talking about online

Hi all, I want to find a job as a RoR developer, but as I have ~10 years coding gap in my CV (I played poker, ran poker forum and did other poker related things) I decided to start some real life projects to build my GitHub portfolio.<p>LaptopHits.com is the first one. Idea came to me when two of my friends wanted to buy new laptops and asked me,&#x27;the computer guy&#x27;, for some recommendations. I&#x27;m not laptop expert, so I usually ask for price range, display size, brand preferences and check some popular forums for laptop recommendations. To save some time doing this I wrote LaptopHits.com. It should collect all laptop mentions from all online discussions, but for now, as it&#x27;s just MVP version, online discussion == Reddit comments and laptop mentions == Amazon links.<p>What do you think about it ?

Idea: Pivot into ProductHits.com and do this for different categories. Use Amazon affiliate links and promote it on social media by making videos and blog posts about &quot;this weeks top ten products&quot;.<p>You owe it to yourself to make this. :)<p>PS. If you dont I will. ;)

Visiting the first link (Dell 15.6-Inch Gaming Laptop) on amazon the price i see is $799.99. Visiting in private browsing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Dell-15-6-Inch-Quad-Core-i5-6300HQ-Processor&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B015PYYDMQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Dell-15-6-Inch-Quad-Core-i5-6300HQ-Pr...</a> the price changes to 699$. Is this standard practice for amazon?

This is great, and perfect timing too (considering proximity to holiday shopping)! Also, the minimal styling keeps things running faster, and in a non-obtrusive manner.<p>One small&#x2F;tiny recommendation: you may want to add a little more content as to the background on this...so visitors understand where the data comes from (mentions in reddit forums, etc.), and that while this doesn&#x27;t encompass everything on the internet, it skews toward mentions from tech-centric websites, etc. Again, don;t need to go crazy, just expand a tiny bit more on the data background...and hey, might as well insert something about you (which might help you get more coverage for future jobs! ;-).<p>Otherwise, kudos for shipping this! Cheers!

+1 for the minimal styling. Although I am starting to wonder if we could do a better job with the choice of colors and typography alone still living with the minimal CSS&#x2F;JS trickery.<p>One website that caught my attention made me bookmark for inspiration was <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recipes.177milkstreet.com&#x2F;recipes&#x2F;sticky-toffee-pudding" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recipes.177milkstreet.com&#x2F;recipes&#x2F;sticky-toffee-puddi...</a><p>For their use of typography, usage of lines, hexagonal contrasting title bits. I am not a web designer. Just ranting about something I liked as a end-user.<p>I have no relationship whatsoever with the website I linked to.

Good timing for this product! With so many Macbook Pro users upset and looking for Linux <i>(like myself)</i>, being able to find a laptop with excellent build quality will be really nice!

I absolutely love the clear, fast, no-nonsense and almost Pinboard-like styling and layout.

I know it&#x27;s an MVP but I miss this old style of faceting. These days selecting or unselecting a facet takes so long. The clean aesthetic really appeals to me also. I guess modern companies need ways to differentiate themselves and big nasty designs are they say to go.

<i>Laptops with an ethernet port</i> filter would be great. They are going to be <i>extinct</i>.

Is there any semantic analysis? Is there any trend of people talking about these laptops to say &quot;stay away from ...&quot; ?

Nice! A feature request: I&#x27;d like to be able to filter by graphics card. Specifically when I&#x27;m looking for a gaming notebook I will probably want a GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 1070 or GTX 1080.

Nice job! A feature request: Filter or note showing if laptop has numeric keypad. I can&#x27;t stand those, no idea why manufacturers add those to every single bigger laptop.

please add option to filter by max ram capacity, and whether the hdd is upgradeable. I just started to look for a ram and HDD upgrade for my 3 yr old ASUS zenbook prime, only to find out neither were upgradeable. I wish I knew that before I paid $1100.

Looks like people are talking about poor laptop choices. Currently, only 2 are actually mobile enough for daily trips, and most of them have the kind of build where you know the thing will start falling apart 3 years into use. ;-)

I&#x27;d love to be able to filter it by the type of subreddits they&#x27;re mentioned in. For example, what are development subreddits mentioning? Gaming subreddits?<p>Otherwise, great start.

Nice. Keep it up. Side projects like this are what has gotten me into this career.<p>I&#x27;ve actually been thinking about hacking together something very much like this, because I found myself manually making spreadsheets for cross-checking specs when shopping for a laptop recently. In addition to the facets you have, I also wanted to have max RAM, CPU, and SSD size to filter by. Might be useful additions.

It would be nice to see which ones are linux friendly and don&#x27;t come with Windows preinstalled.

Wow, just what I was looking for! Thanks, I just purchased the #1 recommended one since it&#x27;s exactly the specs I needed and right within the budget. And yes, it included the referrer code :)

Please tell me you&#x27;ve got Amazon affiliate links set up on these.

Nice work! Reminds me of the old pricewatch days (which, apparently is still a thing!)<p>If you&#x27;re looking for recommendations, one of the most important specs to me personally is the screen resolution.

I did something similar (not for laptops) but Amazon rejected my affiliate application because there was not enough &quot;original content&quot; on the site.

Dissapointing lack of Clevo&#x2F;Sager talk, lol. But other than that, seems pretty awesome. Discovered a couple of brands I didn&#x27;t even know about.

Nice job! I&#x27;d love to see an integration with www.specout.com for processor and GPU comparisons (even just links).

This is a good idea, and something I&#x27;d use. Curious why Apple is not included in the &quot;all brands&quot; section?

Being able to filter by amount of RAM, SSD&#x2F;HDD and maybe the most common CPU lines, would be nice.

Would love to see something like this for Photography&#x2F;video equipment.

It looks great despite having very little styling!

a) nice project<p>b) people are really not good at recommending laptops. 10 of the first 10 in the top 10 are really not good laptops to buy.

hackers delight :)

nice job

<p><pre><code> $(&#x27;a&#x27;).css({&#x27;text-decoration&#x27;: &#x27;none&#x27;, color: &#x27;navy&#x27;}) </code></pre> edit: you&#x27;re right this is a particularly low quality comment.<p>Just think the site could use some toning down on the styling. More visually pleasing, less distracting. Personal opinion, that is all.