Re:Ask HN: How do you consume Hacker News?
by RiderOfGiraffes on Sunday November 22, 2009 @06:06PM
(#956376)
Why doesn't someone build the site-scraper, and provide an API to its results?
I assumed it would be worse technically. Perhaps if it was OK to relentlessly poll, it could be a good service. Things like votes and comment edits would be hard to capture quickly unless every single item was relentlessly polled.
On the other hand I am not trying to rule out viable alternatives by suggesting it comes straight from HN, I even considered making what you are saying at one time. I just don't think it would be as good as an HN one.
Re:Ask HN: How do you consume Hacker News?
by tdupree on Sunday November 22, 2009 @09:20PM
(#956618)
I was thinking the same thing a while back. An API for HN would be awesome. A problem with that though is that it is really only a one way street and only allows for passive consumption rather than easily interacting. While a site-scraper API implementation would be handy, I think people would lose out on the functionality and community interactions that can only really be had at news.ycombinator.com.
Still though, I suppose some sort of site-scraped data (perhaps hosted on google apps for everyone to use) could be used in tandem with a greasemonkey script to further enhance the site without taking away the interactivity, that could be interesting...
Everyone seems to start with building their own screenscraper + polling infrastructure (see two cool sites, for example, http://hntrends.com and http://searchyc.com/ ) which seems like a demotivating and fragile obstacle in the way of getting at the problem space where people actually want to experiment.
The SearchYC site (which is great don't get me wrong) has a JSON interface but only for search queries, not the more comprehensive and notification-based system that a definitive API could be.
My comment that there is no API could also be seen as a "gripe" I guess, but I am not really complaining about anything. I love HN and will continue to excessively visit the current website as-is. I also don't even know how PG feels about the issue (i.e., is it "will never happen" or "no time"?).