Our plan is for the next version of HN's API to simply serve a JSON version of every page. I'm hoping to get to that this year.

That would be amazing!

I've been having some fun with the API recently building this tool: https://github.com/dogsheep/hacker-news-to-sqlite

Wow, that would make it really easy to implement an alternative HN client.

Related Question: Is this the source code for HN? https://github.com/wting/hackernews

That page says the code is copied from http://arclanguage.org/install, which is indeed an old version of the HN source code. It has changed a lot over the years though.

Any chance of some newer code being released, or the addition of a place to submit patches?

I'd love to do that someday. But it would be a lot of work.

Are there plans for an export tool, e.g. a user downloading all their comments and upvoted submissions? I tend to use the submission upvote button more than the favorite one, and an export tool wouldn't require a user API key for non-private info.

My tool here can export all of a user's comments: https://github.com/dogsheep/hacker-news-to-sqlite

Not upvoted yet as they aren't in the API I am using.

That should be an easy extension of the JSON API once we have it.

Hi Dan,

That's great news! Is there a way to be notified (eg, via email) when this comes out?

Thanks.

If you (or anyone) want to be on an alpha-tester list, email [email protected] and we can add you. Send a username and make sure it has the email address you want to be notified at.

That's great! Is there any plan of exposing authenticated content through the API too? Mainly talking about upvoted stories.

Thanks Simon. I'd originally written this script to export my DVD ratings from Netflix, since there's no API for that either. It was easy to adapt it to HN.

I wanted to show people that it's possible (and easy) to get to your own data!