I always thought a HN API would be awesome, would give us a lot more freedom to mold HN into different interfaces. I have toyed with the idea of a scraper but I think that ends up being a bit of a broken solution.

I wrote a greasemonkey script for HN a while back that I can't live without now. There are actually a couple great HN greasemonkey scripts out there. You could always try making a mashup of those that have your favorite elements. You may end up making something that a lot of people find useful.

If you like, give Hacker News OnePage a whirl: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512