I just bought that app after using http://www.icombinator.net for a long time. I like the app but wish it did things a little differently--default to mobilized articles, go beyond the top 30 articles, load comments more quickly--so it's great to have something to customize and hack on. Thanks!

There is also http://ihackernews.com.

I moved from icombinator to ihackernews since ihackernews acts more like a normal web app (icombinator locks the page as it reloads and makes it hard to come back to articles). However, it has a hard time grabbing comments (most don't work right), so it's frustrating to use.

What happens is my IP gets blocked by YC. So until the traffic dies down or I change my IP address, it errors out while getting the comments (YC serves me a blank page).

That issue is actually why I went with a distributed approach to news:yc. Yeah, it's a pain: no remote updates (App Store restrictions) and a lengthy review process for each change needed (do you know about how often the markup changes, btw?), but I don't have to deal with any caching, rate limiting, or anything else this way.

(Of course, I don't even think you can do anything like that on the web (even JavaScript, cross-domain issues), so your approach is probably required there.)

You could probably get away with remotely updating some sort of declarative grammar/schema, as long as it doesn't allow arbitrary code execution.

If it isn't too slow, you could do the parsing with some remotely-updatable JavaScript, using UIWebView's stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:.

It hasn't changed since I made http://ihackernews.com

There are some decent HN iPhone apps (still, it's nice to see another one because the existing ones are certainly not perfect) but all the iPad apps (there are four or five) are pretty bad — especially the visuals but their functionality is also very poor. If I didn't overlook anything all just present you with a list of articles and upon clicking on one you get two tabs, one gets you to the article, the other to the comments on HN.