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Comment by ShabbyDoo | Hacker News Reader

There's no HN API, right? So, you have to screen-scrape?

Unfortunately, yeah, I'm just getting the HTML of the home-page and slicing and dicing it.

Oh, how I wish there was an API... I kept the HTML-getting stuff in its own class, so if HN ever adds an API, I can slot that right in there instead.

I haven't yet tried out HN on my new Droid, but I've found that I far prefer purpose-built apps over just using "normal" sites. For example, the twitter app is much easier for my fat fingers than using the twitter site via the Android browser. With an API,....

Is that the standard twitter site, the old m.twitter.com site for mobile phones or the new mobile.twitter.com for webkit based phones?

This is an area where webapps should already be competitive.

Oh...I'm new to the whole smartphone thing...I'll have to try mobile twitter.

Given that you're fetching, slicing and dicing, why can't you then provide an API? That would be uber-cool ...

The thing is, I could, but because I'm not at all related to HN in any official way, it would be up to me to change how the API gets data from HN whenever HN changes anything at their end. That would mean there'd probably be a delay between HN making changes and me making changes, during which time any applications using the API wouldn't work.

I'd happily do it with the blessing of the officials at Y Combinator :)

What's your implementation language?

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