Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so all of those are for reading, but I don't see any that would allow voting and commenting on HN. It's also the case with pretty much all other HN apps/interfaces I've seen (with notable exception of HN Enhancement Suite, which is a browser extension).

I don't understand why that is. Is there some important rule of HN that disallows any third-party interaction except through the official interface? Or do people simply treat viewing HN as a MVP, and give up after making it?

As it is, those tools seem only useful for HN readers / lurkers, not that much for those of us who participate in discussions here.

View on HN

I use Materialistic (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidr...). I can read comment vote, although down voting is not available.

Option #1 hckrnews and some of the other options don't disrupt voting or commenting much at all, they're just a bunch of links to the main Hacker News web site: you have to click through to Hacker News to read the comments, so that's how you upvote and/or comment.

Preventing you from upvoting without actually reading the articles and/or comments is probably a good thing.

There is no proper API, IIRC. All those clients scrape the website.

There is (or at least was) an API, AFAIK read-only though. I still don't see why one couldn't combine the API and scrapping to get a full read/write interface going.

Wouldn't that require you to give a random site your login to post on your behalf?

It would. Whether you should is another thing entirely. I'm asking why noone seems to even offer the option?

I can't speak for anyone else, but if it were me, I wouldn't expect anyone to trust me enough to use it, so why bother?

People likely would use it. It's a HN account, not a bank account.

Yes, but they shouldn't.

Even though I have no ill intent and it's just an account on a silly web forum, they shouldn't and it would make me sad if they did.

Some of those are apps. Apps should be fine to use those accounts, as they should not contact anything else than HN and HN's API.

But I guess the only way to be sure is to write one yourself.

MiniHack on iOS let's you post and vote if you login through the app.

Or better: why can't HN developers please work on API? Probably brcause building one takes too much effort.... and they don't see reasons to develop one.

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