I completely agree - I just wondered how one would do that and wrote the Bash script. Then I tried to optimize it with C++ and finally thought - why not share.

Btw, your comment somehow didn't get detected by my service :-). First I thought I have a bug somewhere, but then I checked the result from the official HN API and for some reason it fails to return a result for the item id (30014342) of your comment [0]. Strange .. haven't seen this before.

[0] https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/30014342.json

Edit: and it just showed up -- I guess it can take some time.