Interesting you say this, since it seems like DiffBot is doing something similar and received positive media recently: http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/diffbot-aims-to-build-the-i...
I put the HN front page through their Discussion API Test Drive...and it identifies submission elements except submission score and plain submission URL. Which is a problem.
http://www.stockhouse.com/companies/bullboard/t.y/yellow-med...
Is this the type of task DiffBot could theoretically accomplish? (Running it through the API test drive suggests no.) Are there any other tools that might work, or is this a problem that requires hand-coding?
If you'd like me to set you up with a demo, feel free to email me: dru@diffbot.com
All of our automatic APIs aren't meant to be used on directories or listings pages (for that, we provide a crawler which gathers those links and then feeds them into our automatic APIs). The discussion API is intended to be used on discussion pages, for instance: http://www.diffbot.com/testdrive/?api=discussion&url=https%3...
If you wanted just a list of submissions and score, you could use our custom API toolkit(similar to Kimono): http://www.diffbot.com/products/custom/