Hacker News Reader

Yeah I used Dapper.net to scrape the homepage and have it return an XML result set. Here's the Dap: http://www.dapper.net/dapp-howto-use.php?dappName=HNhomepage You can have it output JSON, RSS, XML, whatever...

sean

View on HN

Yeah, but that (a) requires scraping, and (b) only gives you the vote totals. Given a raw feed far more interesting things could be done -- say, figuring out which people tend to like the same stories as you.

I wonder how many people are running bots on HN to correct some 'perceived' shortcoming of the site.

The fact that people like to read HN in different ways isn't due to shortcomings in HN -- it's simply an inevitable result of the fact that HN has a large and non-homogeneous readership, and thus any one way to view HN will not satisfy everybody.

So, the lack of configurability would then count as a shortcoming ?

Maybe services like HN should be built up around an API where the default website is just one way to use the site.

Everybody that is capable of doing so can then roll their own.

Maybe services like HN should be built up around an API where the default website is just one way to use the site.

Many sites don't like that approach because it limits their ability to serve up advertising; but for a site like HN, that would make a great deal of sense -- it has certainly worked for twitter.

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