As an API, it was rather unknown. Guess what really ticked people off was the redistribution of the complete data. There are several custom private APIs that sc

As an API, it was rather unknown. Guess what really ticked people off was the redistribution of the complete data. There are several custom private APIs that scrape HN already (see backtype for instance http://www.backtype.com/page/paulgraham.com%2Ffounders.html http://www.backtype.com/page/paulgraham.com%2Ffounders.html and http://www.backtype.com/url/news.ycombinator.com%252fuser%3Fid%3Dpg http://www.backtype.com/url/news.ycombinator.com%252fuser%3F... and http://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/y-combinator-scraper/ http://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/y-combinator-scraper/), and people don't seem to care the slightest. Not to mention there are open source tools to scrape HN by yourself: https://github.com/JackDanger/hacker_news https://github.com/JackDanger/hacker_news