Hacker News is very useful to Googlebot, and it gets crawled by it every day. It is also useful for people programming Selenium etc to automate using it to coll

Hacker News is very useful to Googlebot, and it gets crawled by it every day. It is also useful for people programming Selenium etc to automate using it to collect data. Conversely, an API is not useful without a human or something automated to use it. The point of REST/HATEOAS is not to have arbitrary random APIs that can be magically discovered by a random magic application. There must be some agreements and standards there. OData, GData and AtomPub are good examples of APIs that follow HATEOAS, if you want something that's not HTML+browser.