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Hacker News API

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Hacker News API

#131

Post by jffry »

dang wrote: post #66

To everyone asking about logged-in access and write access: this is just a first release! Where it goes from here will depend, in good iterative fashion, on what people want.

I think part of the angst centers around the bit where the markup is going to change. Lots of apps for HN that scrape the UI rely upon the current site to enable things like voting and other signed-in-only actions, for which there is (currently) no first-class API way to do these things. Even if the endpoints for voting change, getting other information (i.e. which items you voted on, so the vote arrows hide) is still markup-dependent.

Re: Hacker News API

#135

Post by squeaky-clean »

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?

Because the website looks terrible on a phone/small screen. I visit ihackernews.com more often than I actually visit news.ycombinator.com

Re: Hacker News API

#137

Post by jaredsohn »

Here is something I built with the Algolia API awhile back and just haven't gotten around to cleaning it up to post here.

It lets you download all comments/stories for a user as a JSON or CSV file, breaks down karma between comments and stories, and plots comment/story counts, karma, etc. over time on a line chart (clicking will show you the details via an hnsearch).

Also I built some npm modules so you can get this information via the commandline.

http://hnuser.herokuapp.com/.

Example: http://hnuser.herokuapp.com/user/tptacek/

The Chrome extension hasn't been updated for awhile (it just superimposes a small amount of this information on the user page).

Re: Hacker News API

#138

Post by nacs »

jamest wrote: post #28

[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.

How does this API work with Firebase?

Is HN data already in Firebase (as its primary data store) or is content from HN's DB getting 'mirrored/cloned' on-demand to Firebase for the API?

Re: Hacker News API

#139

Post by me_bx »

eevilspock wrote: post #88
me_bx wrote: post #72

I hope they'll add an article search (by keyword) feature soon.

The API will allow others to come up with competing designs for HN search.

Yes, but someone willing to get the HN posts about a certain topic from the API will need to keep polling the API to get all the new submissions, and filter out the content irrelevant to her purpose. Search directly from the API would be so much more convenient.

Re: Hacker News API

#140

Post by ukd1 »

dang wrote: post #69
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…

As someone who poured countless hours into meticulously scraping the HN markup and faces the prospect of having to port all my code with dread, I'll probably be pleading for an extension alongside you.

A preview release / staging version would help those of us with scrapers update it, without having a so much downtime / scramble when it's finally released.
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