Ask HN: Why HN RSS Feed has no date? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why HN RSS Feed has no date?

3 pointswatermel0n5 comments

I was parsing HackerNews rss feed and I cannot find anywhere in the feed published or updated dates, timestamps or whatever similar. Does anyone know why?

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The RSS feed is just a mirror of the HN frontpage.

Date is not as relevant as points are. Remember, the vast majority of articles are crappy and never make it to the front page. An RSS feed full of 1 point submissions is not very useful.

Exactly that, and in addition, if you're pulling articles from the Hacker News feed, you have to do more than just grab the 'most recent', because you'll get major duplication because articles move up and down the RSS feed all day long.

The (fairly obvious) solution is just to make sure that URLs are stored as uniques, but my 20 minute reader application overlooked that on the first pass.

Is there any possible way to get only the front page without using scraping tools?

Per api.iHackerNews.com, you could do this.

    http://api.ihackernews.com/page or
    http://api.ihackernews.com/page/{nextId}

I just ran a GET request against those endpoints with Postman[1] and got what looks like exactly the right data in JSON format.

[1] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman-rest-clien...

Thanks! :D

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