Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hacker News API

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 315 posts

Re: Hacker News API

#191

Post by tudborg »

airlocksoftware wrote: post #35

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…

Just wanted to drop a comment on the awesomeness of your app. Hacker News 2 is by far the best Hacker News app, not just on Android, but on all mobile platforms i've tried (so, iOS, Android and Windows Phone) Awesome work you are doing.

Re: Hacker News API

#192

Post by Livven »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #180
Livven wrote: post #50

I've been working on a Hacker News client for Windows Phone over the past several weeks and am very close to an initial release, so I feel somewhat ambivalent about this. On the one hand, of course it's great that HN is finally getting a proper API and also modernizing its markup (which is a mess even if you ignore all the tables – for example, the first paragraph in a comment usually isn't wrapped in tags), but on t…

Or use my Hacker News client for Windows Phone: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/hacker-news/a527...

I've tried your app, it's functional but obviously I wasn't satisfied with any of the existing options which is why I wrote my own ;) It should be coming out this week, just a few finishing touches now...

Re: Hacker News API

#193

Post by deutronium »

I'm just wondering if you'd consider releasing a regular data dump, possibly via bittorrent.

As I'd like to do some analysis, but don't really want to thrash the API, downloading all data.

Re: Hacker News API

#194

Post by colinbartlett »

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…

Another frequent contributor, edw519, has published an ebook of his or her comments: http://hn.my/edw519

Re: Hacker News API

#195

Post by godgod »

Bad idea. We don't need another process to slow hacker news down anymore. It's already operating at crawl speed. Why the hell is this site so slow?

Re: Hacker News API

#196

Post by sararob »

burntcookie90 wrote: post #16

Very cool, I'm glad I prepped my android app for this :D One question: why the choice of returning everything as an ID, on mobile, this will require a lot of very small network requests.

If you use the Firebase SDKs the request is sent over a reused full duplex socket rather than creating new/individual connections.

Re: Hacker News API

#197

Post by josephlord »

piyush_soni wrote: post #116
airlocksoftware wrote: post #35

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?

Potentially offline access to comments.

Re: Hacker News API

#198

Post by enobrev »

piyush_soni wrote: post #170
airlocksoftware wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you in theory, but most mobile websites are poorly thought out and implemented - if at all. I definitely don't download apps for every site I use, but for the ones I use daily, I generally find I need to. Native OS interactions seem to be difficult to get right in the browser.

HN is definitely an example of a site that isn't ideal in a mobile browser. For instance, if you have the ability to downvote, it's incredibly easy to mistakenly downvote when you mean to upvote because how close and small the buttons are. There's other added functionality, like tracking who I've upvoted / downvoted in the past as well as tracking un/read comments when returning to a thread. In the browser, I use a chrome extension for this, and on my phone, I use airlocksoftware's app. (side-note, I wish said state carried between the extension and the app)

The developers of HN are surely capable of creating a mobile website that could work just as well, or even better than a mobile app. But currently, it's not ideal. And for that reason, I completely appreciate airlocksoftware's (and the devs of other HN apps) for their efforts.

Re: Hacker News API

#200

Post by x0x0 »

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…

off the top of my head: highest value word patio11 writes is "more" or "raise"...
Post reply on HN