Live data from Hacker News

Hacker News API

blog.ycombinator.com

161–170 of 315 posts

Re: Hacker News API

#161

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…

Here are some line charts of his posting history: http://hnuser.herokuapp.com/user/patio11/ Click on the line chart to do an hnsearch for the time period. Update: Site should be back up. It crashes occasionally (that's part of why I hadn't post it yet.)

Oops, Application Error. You getting the HN effect?

Re: Hacker News API

#162

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/

Very cool. Would be neat if changes were more pronounced when they happen. Will the posts change order in this demo if they change on the homepage?

Re: Hacker News API

#163

How does this differ from the Algolia HN API in terms of data access? ( https://hn.algolia.com/api ) I was able to download all HN data recently with ease using that endpoint. Authentication? EDIT: After looking at the documentation there are two new aspects of the Firebase API not in the Algolia API: 1) Ability to see deleted/dead stories. 2) Endpoint for user data. Question to kogir/dang: Has the "delay" field (Del…

I'm also curious whether it removes some of the limitations of the Algolia version; I wanted to download my content for some statistical analysis (notes at http://www.gwern.net/HN ) but I discovered that it seems there's some hard limits to how much of my data I can reach: https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/pull/36

Re: Hacker News API

#164

This... 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…

So why, in the first place, would I want another mobile app rather than just opening the fully functional website (which is pretty simple & basic already) on my mobile browser?

The API can be used to create a mobile friendly site, since the official one is not for some odd reason.

Re: Hacker News API

#165
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tptacek is similarly impressive, with 30,051 posts. https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/tptacek.json?prin...

"Impressive" is one word for it, I guess.

LOL. My first thought was, "That's kind of a dick comment." My second thought was, "Oh, it must be tptacek himself." :-)

Re: Hacker News API

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some line charts of his posting history: http://hnuser.herokuapp.com/user/patio11/ Click on the line chart to do an hnsearch for the time period. Update: Site should be back up. It crashes occasionally (that's part of why I hadn't post it yet.)

Oops, Application Error. You getting the HN effect?

[deleted]

Re: Hacker News API

#167

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…

tptacek is similarly impressive, with 30,051 posts. https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/tptacek.json?prin...

You can get a 'prettier' version by removing .json entirely:

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/tptacek

Re: Hacker News API

#168
post #146
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."

When everyone === lucky to have a supported platform.

Re: Hacker News API

#169
post #159
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use the Firebase libraries rather than the REST one to efficiently handle requests. I believe it uses a websocket internally. "It does all the work for you and is awesome." to quote Nick.

Well unfortunately there's no Firebase SDK for Windows Phone/C#/WinRT, and the WebSocket API is undocumented. EDIT: After having played with the JS SDK a bit I'd like to add that it is indeed incredibly awesome.

[Firebase founder] There is a Firebase C# SDK on the way. We've had some other things, that we've been working on for the last year, that are shipping in the next few weeks which have taken priority. After that, we'll be shifting focus to new SDKs (they're a little complicated and take a bit of time to build)

Re: Hacker News API

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why, in the first place, would I want another mobile app rather than just opening the fully functional website (which is pretty simple & basic already) on my mobile browser?

Because it can be better designed, use common design / navigation patterns of your mobile OS, notify you when you get a reply, change the text size, change the theme, have richer animations, and allow you to automatically share content from other applications directly to HN?

Yeah. I'm just a bit averse to apps scraping data for the reasons you mentioned. It should have been the work of the mobile website, not an app. Speaking purely from the user's point of view (not the developer - I realize this is a community full of app developers) - one can't just keep installing apps for every website which is not mobile efficient yet. You all must have seen a lot of websites showing messages like "Welcome, we have an app, pess OK to install that, or Cancel to continue". Most of those websites don't do anything which a mobile website couldn't.
Post reply on HN