Hacker News API • Hacker News Board

Re: Hacker News API

#141

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:14 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Hacker News API

#142

Post by conductr » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:18 PM UTC

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…

Might be easier/quicker to use the API to generate your own HN clone with HTML in it's current format, then point your App at that

Re: Hacker News API

#143

Post by bennyg » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:18 PM UTC

I've been waiting forever for an API from HN, but unfortunately I will not be using it for my app (https://github.com/bennyguitar/News-YC---iPhone).

I've built a library for iOS (https://github.com/bennyguitar/libHN) that handles scraping, commenting, submitting, voting, etc pretty well and allows me to make as few web calls as necessary to use HN. It looks like I'd have to drop functionality and completely change the networking scheme to match this API - something I'm not willing to do yet.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but to get every comment on a post, I'd have to recursively get each item for each child. Instead, right now, I can make one network request and get all comments for a story. Granted, I have to parse the HTML (which I hate), but it's a much cleaner solution than going through every item, checking the children and then getting those items ad infinitum. Again, I just glanced over the documentation, but that seems untenable to me.

Re: Hacker News API

#144

Post by kogir » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:20 PM UTC

bennyg wrote: post #143

I've been waiting forever for an API from HN, but unfortunately I will not be using it for my app ( https://github.com/bennyguitar/News-YC---iPhone ). I've built a library for iOS ( https://github.com/bennyguitar/libHN ) that handles scraping, commenting, submitting, voting, etc pretty well and allows me to make as few web calls as necessary to use HN. It looks like I'd have to drop functionality and completely chang…

If you use the Firebase iOS library they handle it all and use an efficient bidirectional streaming protocol.

Re: Hacker News API

#145

Post by dstaley » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:21 PM UTC

Decided to recreate the Hacker News homepage using Ember and the new API. I was really pleased with how easy it was! https://realtimehackernews.firebaseapp.com/

Re: Hacker News API

#146

Post by dailen » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:23 PM UTC

bennyg wrote: post #143

I've been waiting forever for an API from HN, but unfortunately I will not be using it for my app ( https://github.com/bennyguitar/News-YC---iPhone ). I've built a library for iOS ( https://github.com/bennyguitar/libHN ) that handles scraping, commenting, submitting, voting, etc pretty well and allows me to make as few web calls as necessary to use HN. It looks like I'd have to drop functionality and completely chang…

Check the article btw

"Most importantly, the reason we released an API is so that we can start modernizing the markup on Hacker News. Because there are a lot of apps and projects out there that rely on scraping the site to access the data inside it, we decided it would be best to release a proper API and give everyone time to convert their code before we launch any new HTML."

Re: Hacker News API

#147

Post by wvl » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:23 PM UTC

Would it be possible to cache the number of comments a story has? Or am I wrong in my understanding that the only way to find the number of comments a story has is to walk the tree of child items and maintain my own count?

Re: Hacker News API

#148

Post by DanBC » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:25 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #34

christiangenco wrote: post #30

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? --- 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…

In February, I did an analysis on all Hacker News stories: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/ Yesterday, I published an analysis on all Hacker News comments: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ There's a lot of interesting trends in the data. Let me know if you want to know anything in particular and I'll get back to you. :)

It'd be interesting to see if including an URL in the body of a post has any effect on votes received.

Re: Hacker News API

#149

Post by wvl » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:28 PM UTC

kogir wrote: post #17

tokenizerrr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue tracker on https://github.com/HackerNews/API appears to be disabled, though the summary says "Documentation, Samples, and Issue Tracking for the Official HN API."

We decided email would be better until we got a feel for things. Updated. Examples are coming soon, but we didn't want to make people wait.

Please consider opening up the issue tracker. Other people might benefit from seeing these issues, such as the issue about the comment count that I just raised as a comment here.

Re: Hacker News API

#150

Post by bennyg » Tue, Oct 07, 2014, 8:30 PM UTC

dailen wrote: post #146

bennyg wrote: post #143

I've been waiting forever for an API from HN, but unfortunately I will not be using it for my app ( https://github.com/bennyguitar/News-YC---iPhone ). I've built a library for iOS ( https://github.com/bennyguitar/libHN ) that handles scraping, commenting, submitting, voting, etc pretty well and allows me to make as few web calls as necessary to use HN. It looks like I'd have to drop functionality and completely chang…

Check the article btw "Most importantly, the reason we released an API is so that we can start modernizing the markup on Hacker News. Because there are a lot of apps and projects out there that rely on scraping the site to access the data inside it, we decided it would be best to release a proper API and give everyone time to convert their code before we launch any new HTML."

Yeah, the only problem is that I don't want to cut major functionality just to use their API. Things I do, that it doesn't look like the API handles:

    - More than 100 stories
    - Best, Top, Ask, ShowHN, Jobs, User Submission Posts
    - User Management (logging in/out)
    - Commenting
    - Submitting
    - Voting

My app doesn't just function as a reader, which is what this API seems geared towards with the v0 release, it functions as about as full-fledged of an HN client as you could get. There's a couple things that I haven't built in yet like changing your about me text, but those were on the roadmap.

I'm actually thinking about storing the configuration of how my app scrapes online such that if the HTML markup changes, I won't have to push huge sweeping changes to the App Store to get my app online again. I just deploy to Heroku and the app will handle that configuration and scrape correctly sans pushing to Apple.