"Most importantly, the reason we released an API is so that we can start modernizing the markup on Hacker News. Because there are a lot of apps and projects out there that rely on scraping the site to access the data inside it, we decided it would be best to release a proper API and give everyone time to convert their code before we launch any new HTML."
Yeah, the only problem is that I don't want to cut major functionality just to use their API. Things I do, that it doesn't look like the API handles:
- More than 100 stories
- Best, Top, Ask, ShowHN, Jobs, User Submission Posts
- User Management (logging in/out)
- Commenting
- Submitting
- Voting
My app doesn't just function as a reader, which is what this API seems geared towards with the v0 release, it functions as about as full-fledged of an HN client as you could get. There's a couple things that I haven't built in yet like changing your about me text, but those were on the roadmap.
I'm actually thinking about storing the configuration of how my app scrapes online such that if the HTML markup changes, I won't have to push huge sweeping changes to the App Store to get my app online again. I just deploy to Heroku and the app will handle that configuration and scrape correctly sans pushing to Apple.
"Most importantly, the reason we released an API is so that we can start modernizing the markup on Hacker News. Because there are a lot of apps and projects out there that rely on scraping the site to access the data inside it, we decided it would be best to release a proper API and give everyone time to convert their code before we launch any new HTML."