3 ms·

I know that. I've not worked with the API, and there's the blessing/curse (blurse‽) that HTML is a known, if poor, standard. API always translates to "one mor

I know that. I've not worked with the API, and there's the blessing/curse (blurse‽) that HTML is a known, if poor, standard. API always translates to "one more thing to learn, that's applicable to a single-use case". HTML scraping / sorting I can apply across multiple sites. That said, a standard, say, JSON packaging of website contents available on request might be fun to have.

fragmede 3mo ago
I feel less bad hammering firebase in a "while True:" loop vs hitting HN's servers.
- dredmorbius 3mo ago
  12,000 times less bad? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48868910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48868910>
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Between me and you, I don't think Google would register that amongst the noise of just running the service anyway on their monitoring systems. You're right to point out that if you're trying to get the contents of dead objects the API is of no use though.
    - dredmorbius 3mo ago
      Google might not register it, but in some related testing, even a few hundred requests through the API (serial, not concurrent) takes much longer than a single "Past" page request would, even if the latter were substantially rate-limited. Of course, if those requests (to HN itself rather than the API) are blocked entirely, that's a moot issue. On dead/flagged items, there's some value. Whilst the title/URL context aren't available, just knowing what fraction of submissions and comments are moderated is interesting data, and it is possible to construct patterns against specific accounts. I'm frequently encountering what appear to be banned accounts. Being able to trace those through the API to see where and when they were banned, or now much moderated activity they're generating, can be useful. I'm relying heavily on the "/replies?id=<UID>&by=<moderator>" search endpoint (generally dang, tomhow, sctb, or pg as mod) currently to find out if there was a specific ban admonishment from a moderator. That's often but not always the case. But it's not possible, say, to tell through the API what sites are banned. Looking at site history with "showdead" enabled can tell you that though, e.g.: <https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=synthetica.cloud https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=synthetica.cloud> (From the New queue, one of several "dead" submissions not flagged, suggesting a site ban.) Hypothesizing an undocumented "site" API endpoint ... doesn't seem to check out: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/site/synthetica.cloud?print=pretty Returns: not found (Similarly for "domain", "url", and "URL".) And there's the "day" endpoint doesn't seem to work either, though it conspicuously does not report "not found", e.g.: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/day/2025-07-10?print=pretty (I've tried a few other date format variants, including Unix time (seconds) without success.)
      - fragmede 3mo ago
        Fascinating.

fragmede 3mo ago

I feel less bad hammering firebase in a "while True:" loop vs hitting HN's servers.

dredmorbius 3mo ago
12,000 times less bad? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48868910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48868910>
- fragmede 3mo ago
  Between me and you, I don't think Google would register that amongst the noise of just running the service anyway on their monitoring systems. You're right to point out that if you're trying to get the contents of dead objects the API is of no use though.
  - dredmorbius 3mo ago
    Google might not register it, but in some related testing, even a few hundred requests through the API (serial, not concurrent) takes much longer than a single "Past" page request would, even if the latter were substantially rate-limited. Of course, if those requests (to HN itself rather than the API) are blocked entirely, that's a moot issue. On dead/flagged items, there's some value. Whilst the title/URL context aren't available, just knowing what fraction of submissions and comments are moderated is interesting data, and it is possible to construct patterns against specific accounts. I'm frequently encountering what appear to be banned accounts. Being able to trace those through the API to see where and when they were banned, or now much moderated activity they're generating, can be useful. I'm relying heavily on the "/replies?id=<UID>&by=<moderator>" search endpoint (generally dang, tomhow, sctb, or pg as mod) currently to find out if there was a specific ban admonishment from a moderator. That's often but not always the case. But it's not possible, say, to tell through the API what sites are banned. Looking at site history with "showdead" enabled can tell you that though, e.g.: <https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=synthetica.cloud https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=synthetica.cloud> (From the New queue, one of several "dead" submissions not flagged, suggesting a site ban.) Hypothesizing an undocumented "site" API endpoint ... doesn't seem to check out: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/site/synthetica.cloud?print=pretty Returns: not found (Similarly for "domain", "url", and "URL".) And there's the "day" endpoint doesn't seem to work either, though it conspicuously does not report "not found", e.g.: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/day/2025-07-10?print=pretty (I've tried a few other date format variants, including Unix time (seconds) without success.)
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      Fascinating.