As far as I know, HN offers an official API here: https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API But it specifically says "We hope to impr

As far as I know, HN offers an official API here: https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API But it specifically says "We hope to improve it over time, and may later enable access to private per-user data using OAuth." So I'm assuming that login, votes, comments, submission is for a future release of the API. That might be why the apps you use resort to scraping HN. For reference, here's the blog post talking about the release of the API: http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api