Hn-api: a simple, ad-hoc Python API for Hacker News
github.com
github.com
HN is also running really pretty slow today.
Just my luck. As soon as HN took a little while to load for me, I knew that someone would mention it in this thread.
I made hn-api understanding that scraping HN is frowned upon, but also hoping that programmers wouldn't do dumb things with it. As I [said][1], I minimised the number of requests hn-api makes to HN.
In the readme, I say that hn-api is unofficial and unauthorised. I also tell people to be gentle with making requests to HN. Is there some other action I should take? Ideally I'd like to keep my work up, but if pg tells me to take it down, I will.
Great, now I feel all dirty like The Pirate Bay.
hn-api only makes one request when it gets stories or one request when you get a user's karma -- that doesn't seem like too much. I knew there was a velocity check on IPs (and that I was making an unofficial API), so I made it as light on HN as possible.
Obviously.
When a request is made to get stories from HN, no HackerNewsUser objects are created (and thus, no karma gets updated). hn-api will only update karma when you, the coder, make a HackerNewsUser object or call the HackerNewsUser.refreshKarma() method.
Like I said -- one request when it gets stories or one request when you get a user's karma.
Then you can specify some kind of time-out (say 3 days or so), after which it does get refreshed.
I'll look into it. Or, if some intrepid volunteer would like to contribute to the project, maybe they could.