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Comment by k7d | Hacker News Reader

This is cool, but the API looks a bit cryptic. Is there a way to simply lookup an item by URL?

Edit: Nevermind, figured it out: http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?prett...

Or, by "id"? I looked, but I wasn't able to figure out, for example, how I'd get pg's top-level comment here from the id "2619846". I was able to find it with this search, but it requires a second-part to the "_id" that I don't know where to find: http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=... (Trying to filter for "id" instead of "_id" throws an error, for some reason.)

The `_id` attribute for each item is its submission id plus a signature. ThriftDB references objects by their unique `_id` attributes.

The `id` attribute on the other hand is an item's submission id. It's not indexed though so you can't do lookup by id.

could you please index the submission ids? i can think of a few reasons this would be useful

Would you mind emailing me with your ideas? andres@octopart.com

Exactly.

How do I find this comment through the API? How do I find its replies?

Well that explains why I failed at fetching an item by id, and I tried a whole bunch of different ways. You should really mention somewhere that the "id" referenced is an internal id, and not the HN id.

I would like to lookup items by HN id.

The API docs are a work in progress. Please let me know which parts need work.

For example what's the difference between "filter[queries][]" and "q" arguments for http://www.thriftdb.com/documentation/rest-api/search-api? The way I understand, q does a simple keyword matching on all fields while "filter[queries][]" is more like SQL "where" query. In that case, what operators are supported?

The `q` argument is used to perform a full-text search across all fields. One benefit to using `q` is that you can rank results based on field matches (using the `weights` argument).

The `filter` arguments are used to cut the data before performing a full-text query:

`filter[fields][fieldname]` can be used to filter on fieldnames:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...

`filter[queries][]` can be used to add arbitrary filters:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...

The syntax for filter queries is the same as solr:

http://wiki.apache.org/solr/CommonQueryParameters#fq

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