Hacker News isn't a potentially valuable Internet resource waiting to be mined for interesting new applications. That's Twitter. Hacker News is an actual community.
I don't know or care why the API got blocked, but I've been as happy with as many HN add-on apps as I have been incredibly irritated by them (paging: guy who scraped all HN job postings and made his own job site with them). From what I can tell, it's not actually part of this site's philosophy to be a building block for other people's software ideas.
I agree that the job posting site was really tacky, but that guy entered all the data manually anyhow.
I think in sum total that most add-ons are pointless. A few are useless. And only a very small fraction are bad, and should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
I've never used the Ask YC archive, but I trust Gabriel Weinberg.
I'm not advocating an end to all add-on apps. I'm saying that there is no principle that animates Hacker News that requires Graham to bend over backwards to accomodate APIs. It's a simple, low-drama point.
You misunderstood what I was saying. Start with the firehose. I don't want it to make money, I want it so I can link this flow in with other flows that I'm following without having to visit all the sites. Not trying to make a business, just scratching my own itch having no idea where it leads.
I think it's the other way around; you've missed my point. My point is, contrary to the point you raised in your blog post, it does not appear to be part of the charter of Hacker News to accomodate API's.
Surely you've noticed, over the brief time you've been contributing to Hacker News, that the site functionality is very simple. People have asked for hundreds of features that haven't been implemented. I believe that it's not entirely lack of developer bandwidth that keeps those itches from being scratched.
I've always assumed it was because the feed of all stories as they come in contains a huge amount of junk, and also because RSS on Hacker News is an afterthought. I use RSS as my primary interface to HN, but I also recognize that it's inferior to the site itself.
I'm generally disinclined to replace HN's existing RSS with someone else's RSS feed that might at any moment stop working. HN RSS sucks, but I never have to think about it.
As someone else pointed out, I also depend on SearchYC, which is an external application. The difference is the SearchYC is extraordinarily well known. HN can't cut off SearchYC without alienating a sizeable group of site veterans.
That's more than you probably wanted to know, but, hey, you asked.
I think that's an unfair and inconsistent application of logic.
I like reading HN and recently contributing tiny bits to HN because I think the community here is top-notch, friendly, and knows its stuff. HN never struck me as elitist; rather, it's more like a really friendly meritocracy. About the most elitist it gets is requiring a karma threshold to be able to downvote, but that's really just part of being a good meritocracy.
But to be accepting of one add-on application simply because of heavy site veteran patronage, while rejecting all others... THAT would strike me as heavy elitism and not in line with what seems to make HN so great. If add-on apps MUST be rejected, the criteria should be for other more respectable reasons, no? And mind you, it's all pg's call anyway.
I think the idea behind HN is to have a place where you can go to chat when you are bored or feeling distractable. Having every story posted as its submitted is counterproductive -- it makes HN become a job (like reading Email) instead of something to do once in a while when you feel like it.
I miss probably about 90% of the stories on HN. I enjoy it anyway.
Why is it that every time I visit scripting.com (about twice per year), I'm met with niggling little issues like reload loops or the lovely javascript link to the loopback address -
>Apparently that's because Hacker News has blocked his API.
Does anyone know if this is actually the case? http://api.ihackernews.com gives me a 404, but I'm posting this from ihackernews's browser interface, which obviously is getting updates.
I took down the site after YC blocked my IP address. I believe it was blocked as a result of increased usage from the explosion in traffic, resulting in some really heavy usage of the API. My guess is that YC's software did this automatically to prevent abuse.
In addition, many folks weren't happy with me distributing the HN database. So there really wasn't a reason to keep it up.
I'm going to rework the API such that it will work within the boundary of an acceptable scrapping rate. I'm not putting the database back up.
There were other accounts too that are still active but that he may be locked out of. That particular account got silently hellbanned for sarcasm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=551664
Having read the comments there, I don't see why they had him banned. Perhaps a few were offensive, but nothing the community can't handle. I prefer reading someone like this to safe comments that just recycle bits of PG's essays. HN could use some irreverence.
What incentive does Hacker News have to allow access via an API? At the moment, introducing an API would cost YC money because it would take time to develop and it would potentially increase server costs.
However, allowing others to do the job seems less troublesome.
Creating artificial restrictions to _prevent_ other people from doing so, seems like effort.
I would imagine that the owners of a site would only seek to stem the wholesale flow of information to another property, when inaction is likely to lead to a loss in value.
Where is the value in HN? It could be argued that the value lies in the posts and the related combined wisdom, but I think the true value is related to attention and focus. We come to HN to participate. If the content is allowed to spread to third-party applications (via an API), this primary source of value is lost.
As we are seeing in here there are numerous APIs available (like the one made available via a torrent download, twitter bots, searching, or alternative look & feel) which they must have been doing their own parsing of this site. Would that actually be good to have a official API for all sorts of hacking needs?
If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.
I believe Dave Winer has always advocated writing on your own space and linking into the conversation. I feel this is very insightful advice and pro-web and really "getting it".
I didn't get a chance yet to see what experiment Dave was building, his firehose, because scripting.com is down. But I'd give Dave the benefit of the doubt...
It would be stranger if he didn't post it on his blog. After all his blog has been around for almost 10 years longer than hacker news, was around before they were called blogs. Dave was also the guy that invented RSS.
Am I the only one who wants the firehose and the API to come back? As long as it can be done without taking the servers down and killing HN, that is :-)
I don't know or care why the API got blocked, but I've been as happy with as many HN add-on apps as I have been incredibly irritated by them (paging: guy who scraped all HN job postings and made his own job site with them). From what I can tell, it's not actually part of this site's philosophy to be a building block for other people's software ideas.