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The only thing that I dislike the fast, web version of HN is this desktop layout on mobile, but HN have an API and 100's of mobile clients which work exceptiona

The only thing that I dislike the fast, web version of HN is this desktop layout on mobile, but HN have an API and 100's of mobile clients which work exceptionally well, and a mobile client for HN can be written in hours.

busymom0 5y ago
OP of the post here. I am also the developer of HACK which is a HN client for iOS, MacOS and Android: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer/id1464477788 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.hack https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h... The API for HN is absolute garbage (they admit to it being so too). It's also a read only API and doesn't support actions. My apps rely on scraping the page and then performing actions such as voting, commenting, favouriting, submitting posts etc.
- dang 5y ago
  "Absolute garbage"? We wouldn't admit to that! Read-onlyness was a design choice at the time and still has its place. The main problem with the API is that it's too low-level—you have to do a bunch of work to reconstruct what actually shows up on an HN page. The next version of the HN API will give a simple JSON representation of each HN URL. Initially it will still be read-only though; then we'll see about whether to extend it to writes.
  - busymom0 5y ago
    Sorry, didn't mean admitting to "absolute garbage" in a literal way. Mostly referring to statement such as: > I'm not saying this to defend it - It's not the ideal public API, but it's the one we could release in the time we had. While awkward, it's possible to implement most of HN using it. https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API My words may have been a bit too harsh but I still think I have a point. The only thing I could find use of the API was to get the user's details (karma, description, date created etc). Other than that, I ended up relying on scraping. Unfortunately, unless the JSON api offers write access, it won't be of much use for my app's use cases. Lets just hope the JSON Api isn't going to break anything major in the HTML of the site and there aren't any major re-designs of the site in the pipeline.

busymom0 5y ago

OP of the post here. I am also the developer of HACK which is a HN client for iOS, MacOS and Android: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer/id1464477788 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.hack https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h... The API for HN is absolute garbage (they admit to it being so too). It's also a read only API and doesn't support actions. My apps rely on scraping the page and then performing actions such as voting, commenting, favouriting, submitting posts etc.

dang 5y ago
"Absolute garbage"? We wouldn't admit to that! Read-onlyness was a design choice at the time and still has its place. The main problem with the API is that it's too low-level—you have to do a bunch of work to reconstruct what actually shows up on an HN page. The next version of the HN API will give a simple JSON representation of each HN URL. Initially it will still be read-only though; then we'll see about whether to extend it to writes.
- busymom0 5y ago
  Sorry, didn't mean admitting to "absolute garbage" in a literal way. Mostly referring to statement such as: > I'm not saying this to defend it - It's not the ideal public API, but it's the one we could release in the time we had. While awkward, it's possible to implement most of HN using it. https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API My words may have been a bit too harsh but I still think I have a point. The only thing I could find use of the API was to get the user's details (karma, description, date created etc). Other than that, I ended up relying on scraping. Unfortunately, unless the JSON api offers write access, it won't be of much use for my app's use cases. Lets just hope the JSON Api isn't going to break anything major in the HTML of the site and there aren't any major re-designs of the site in the pipeline.