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Hacker News API

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Re: Hacker News API

#21

Post by mahyarm »

josephwegner wrote: post #14

I really appreciate giving a 3 week heads up before moving to a new frontend structure. It's a nice gesture, but I have this horrible feeling that there's only about a 10% chance that my Hacker News app gets updated in time. I know you can't not iterate because people are scraping, but it does stink. At least this will make everything more future-proof going forward. However, it may be nice to give a bit more heads u…

Maybe they can put the new renderer on a different sub domain for a few weeks after their 3 week deadline. One to beta test the interface and two to give devs a bit more time to convert.

Re: Hacker News API

#23

Post by jack-r-abbit »

josephwegner wrote: post #14

I really appreciate giving a 3 week heads up before moving to a new frontend structure. It's a nice gesture, but I have this horrible feeling that there's only about a 10% chance that my Hacker News app gets updated in time. I know you can't not iterate because people are scraping, but it does stink. At least this will make everything more future-proof going forward. However, it may be nice to give a bit more heads u…

Some sites actively punish scrapers by constantly, purposely changing their markup. So giving them an API and 3 week head start is leaps and bounds above and beyond what can be expected. When you operate a scraper, you are always on the defensive when it comes to site updates suddenly breaking your app. They should be so lucky to get this 3 week notice. It is all on them if they can't turn it around in time.

Re: Hacker News API

#24

Post by kevin »

mahyarm wrote: post #21
josephwegner wrote: post #14

I really appreciate giving a 3 week heads up before moving to a new frontend structure. It's a nice gesture, but I have this horrible feeling that there's only about a 10% chance that my Hacker News app gets updated in time. I know you can't not iterate because people are scraping, but it does stink. At least this will make everything more future-proof going forward. However, it may be nice to give a bit more heads u…

Maybe they can put the new renderer on a different sub domain for a few weeks after their 3 week deadline. One to beta test the interface and two to give devs a bit more time to convert.

We'll probably start with logged out home to a percentage of traffic and work our way to updating the rest of the site and handling the full traffic over a few weeks.

If people need help converting their apps, I believe the Firebase guys have offered to help. Contact us at api@ycombinator.com and we'll connect you.

Re: Hacker News API

#25

Post by Someone1234 »

angersock wrote: post #20

Why do you have all the times in Unix time instead of ISO-8601 UTC? EDIT: Also, the "about" value in the users api appears to be truncated. Compare... https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/angersock# ...with... https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=angersock EDIT2: Note that the JSON is correct, but the preview in the firebase API seems to be broken. EDIT3: No issue tracker on the Github? Laaaame.

UNIX time is actually much easier to parse and more accurate. Almost all platforms (even Windows[0]) have a way to convert a UNIX time into a culture specific local time.

What you're asking for is a string you have to parse. That's a lot more work and there is a lot more that can go wrong.

[0]https://stackoverflow.com/questions/249760/how-to-convert-un...

Re: Hacker News API

#26

Post by josephwegner »

kevin wrote: post #24
mahyarm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they can put the new renderer on a different sub domain for a few weeks after their 3 week deadline. One to beta test the interface and two to give devs a bit more time to convert.

We'll probably start with logged out home to a percentage of traffic and work our way to updating the rest of the site and handling the full traffic over a few weeks. If people need help converting their apps, I believe the Firebase guys have offered to help. Contact us at api@ycombinator.com and we'll connect you.

Love the staged roll out idea. You could probably also use user agents to recognize scrapers from real users (could also be helpful for slowly rolling out to older browsers).

Re: Hacker News API

#28

Post by jamest »

[Firebase founder here] This is pretty exciting for us, we're glad kogir, dang, kevin and sctb chose to expose HN's data through Firebase. We're seen quite a few startups (and big companies like Nest) do this, since building, maintaining, and documenting a public API often isn't a easy task.

Re: Hacker News API

#29

Post by dpcan »

As soon as someone uses this API to create a replica of the site where everything else is the same, but the design is responsive, I want to know about it :)

Re: Hacker News API

#30

Post by christiangenco »

Oh man you guys, patio11 has generated massive amounts of content: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/patio11.json?prin...

I count 8,483 submissions. I'm sure there's something interesting to be done with all of this data. A word frequency chart?

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Edit: So apparently there's a ruby gem that lets you feed it a body of text and generates pseudo-random phrases based on that text.

I present to you the patio11 impersonator: https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/e8d085e47479be0131e1

One of my favorites:

    A nice set of challenges -- kitty at a school with tens of thousands of bucks a year or less immediately.
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Also, a word count on patio11's submissions: 1,052,351. For comparison, all 7 Harry Potter books total 1,084,170 words. patio11 has written the entire Harry Potter series worth of content on HN. Just... wow.

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