Glad to see that HN will still be written in a lisp after these major upgrades.
Hacker News API
101–110 of 315 posts
Re: Hacker News API
#102Nice! I'll be changing my Mac system tray app HackerBar over to use this instead of some Objective-C scraping magic that it uses now: http://hackerbarapp.com/
Wow I've never heard of this but that is a really cool app, I'll definitely check it out. Do you know of anything similar for reddit?
Re: Hacker News API
#103Disappointing they are still going to use Arc even with the update to modern HTML. I despise how with Arc if I leave the page open during the day and try to click a link later the link has expired.
They should really update to a modern web framework at the same time. Big modern frameworks like Rails are making ridiculously awesome improvements like replacing page loads with XHR (quicker loading since JS/styles/etc is all loaded already, no screen flash, etc.) in a progressive enhancements manner.
So Arc can't even generate fully functional links, let alone keep up with modern web advancements.
Re: Hacker News API
#104I am excited about this because now I can finally build a way to query my own posts and comments. I often times come across products/services/cool hacks on here that I vaguely remember, but cannot always locate. Using built-in search is kludgy, and I'd like to be able to do something more complex. Thanks for doing this!
It's interesting that you mention the phenomenom of "I remember seeing it (or maybe even saying it) but I cannot find it". This has happened to me a lot. It is intensely frustrating to me because it's blocking - I don't get much done until I re-find whatever it was.
I wonder how many other people have this? And what their techniques are?
Re: Hacker News API
#105This... is cool, but also kinda sucks for me. I've invested dozens of hours into writing an extremely complicated scraper for my Android version of HN. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksof... The newest version (still under development, probably a month or two from release) adds support for displaying polls, linking to subthreads, and full write support (voting, commenting, submitting, etc). I…
I'm sorry you just invested a lot of time in scraping. I know from experience what a pain that is. We said several times that the API was coming, and I've made it clear to anyone who asked, but there's just no way to reach everybody. All: in the future, please get answers to questions like this by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. Re write access and logged-in access, if that turns out to be how people want to use the API…
I'm not blaming you. It just feels bad, you know? I'll definitely email you in the future about stuff like this. And don't get me wrong, it will be great to be able to throw out the cruft that comes along with parsing the current layout. The app is engineered to be able to drop in a new API pretty quick since I thought something like this would happen eventually.
It would help me out a lot if the current front end would live on under oldnews.ycombinator.com like that until the new API has write access, though. I think it's pretty cool to be able to be reading an article somewhere else, click "Share" in Android and have "Submit to HN" pop up in the results.
Re: Hacker News API
#106I always thought HN was more of a one man job. I didn't realize there is an entire team working on it (full time?). Honestly there doesn't seem to be much to work on here. It's a simple site that rarely changes (at least on the front end).
'Simple site' that gets probably tens of thousand if not hundreds of throusand unique visitors a day.
HN uses 12 lines of javascript total, it's pretty damn simple.
Re: Hacker News API
#107Disappointing they are still going to use Arc even with the update to modern HTML. I despise how with Arc if I leave the page open during the day and try to click a link later the link has expired. They should really update to a modern web framework at the same time. Big modern frameworks like Rails are making ridiculously awesome improvements like replacing page loads with XHR (quicker loading since JS/styles/etc is…
What is it about Arc that causes the unexpired link issue? I know very little about Arc. But I understand it to be a language whereas the issue you describe appears to be the function of some implementation decision. Can you please elaborate?
Re: Hacker News API
#108So, does it mean I can get the top stories, and then get a top story item with all the comment expanded ? I mean, at first it look like it just send me the id and I need to fetch the detail for each of them. Again, this is just looking at the REST API, not the iOS SDK for example. I'll need to "convert" SwiftHN ( https://github.com/Dimillian/SwiftHN ) either to this new API or adapt my scrapping engine to the new sit…
Please do convert it, I am working on a project with some of your code as a base!
Re: Hacker News API
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
[Firebase Dev Advocate here] We don't currently have rate limits. I'd recommend using our SDKs, they handle connections more efficiently than dealing with the REST API. You can also run your own server process using our Node ( https://www.npmjs.org/package/firebase ) or Java libraries ( https://www.firebase.com/docs/android/quickstart.html ).
This implies that your SDKs don't use your own REST API. What do they use instead?
We establish a websocket connection and fall back to long polling when appropriate. This SO question has more details: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12591011/firebase-with-mo...
Re: Hacker News API
#110This is so awesome – albeit a bit overdue ;)
I'm going to start diving into the API to build a simple, powerful "Google Alerts for HN" app on Assembly, and I'd love help from anyone who's interested: https://assembly.com/hn-monitor
There are some products like this out there, but they had to rely on scrapers and the HNSearch API, so I've always found them to be spotty. I think we can make something better.