Looking at the API ...
... it's starting to make sense, but ...
... the API is geared at requesting specific content items (posts, comments, users). There doesn't seem to be a way to directly make a request for a front-page history page (that is, the 30 items archived on a given date. Say, 2008-11-05:
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-11-05>
It's the collection of 30 items from that date I'm interested in. For my scraping, I don't actually need to further query the individual posts as I've got the elements I'm interested in (title, date, story position, URL, votes, comment count, submitter, site/domain) from the index page itself, parsed out of the HTML. The "Past" entries alone are a significant (though not huge) request load. To update the past three years would be about another 1,000 requests, which, if fulfilled and modestly rate-limited would hopefully not keel the servers over.
Once I've pulled in those "Past" pages, I could of course do further API queries, though at this point I don't see any specific need to do so.
I suppose that requesting the "past" links be included in the API set could be a request I might make of HN, or the ability to request, say, all submissions (or comments!) for a given date.
There are groups which have done HN analytics in the past using the API, for example Whaly.io:
"A Year on Hacker News" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31295219>
"Top Hacker News commenters of 2021" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994>
"What Happened This Year on Hacker News (2021)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29769470>
I could look more into their methodology to see if I can use similar approaches.
The existence of "dead" and "deleted" values does seem interesting. I might do some playing with those to see what shows up (I suspect that most additional information is suppressed...)
OK, looking at a recent dead atomic128 comment:
$ curl -s 'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/48820709.json?print=pretty'
{
"by" : "atomic128",
"dead" : true,
"id" : 48820709,
"parent" : 48819517,
"text" : "[flagged]",
"time" : 1783444517,
"type" : "comment"
}
So userID is visible.
And from a current dead submission in the New queue:
$ curl -s 'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/48868688.json?print=pretty'
{
"by" : "millwright-sw",
"dead" : true,
"id" : 48868688,
"score" : 1,
"time" : 1783743361,
"type" : "story"
}
That's missing the title and URL, as I suspected it would, though the submitter UID is available.
To get top stories by date I'd actually have to submit more requests, walking through item numbers, splitting out comments and stories. Based on Whaly's 2021 retrospective, with about 4.2 million items (stories + comments) posted in total, that's about 12,000 items per day. Versus, well, one "Past" page result...