Hacker News API is not well designed

by happppy on 2/1/2019, 10:05 AM with 22 comments

Last night, I thought why not develop a HN clone in react and when I looked at API, Oh my goodness. It is not well designed at all, like passing 400 ids, just ids. And to get posts we have to make requests to get single post detail to show 10 or 20 posts on a page. Well, react helped me a bit like storing ids in array and using splice to get next 10 items and so on.

  • by dang on 2/1/2019, 8:49 PM

    You're right. We'll eventually make a new API that doesn't have those limitations.

    It wasn't carelessness, btw, but technical constraints we were under at the time. We've slowly been removing those.

  • by coldtea on 2/1/2019, 1:39 PM

    Like the website, it doesn't have to be "well designed", it's enough that it works.

  • by Kinnard on 2/3/2019, 7:07 PM

    You may want to gripe on the arc-language forum:

    http://arclanguage.org/forum

  • by anonfunction on 2/1/2019, 2:45 PM

    I heard 10 months ago that HN was developing a new API, no update though.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16720397

  • by gitgud on 2/1/2019, 3:50 PM

    I didn't think it was that bad, free to use and everything has an ID right? If you want details l, query the ID, seems like a super simple base to work on to me.

    There's actually a whole [1] list of opensource Hacker news clones that you can look at to see how they do it...

    [1] https://hnpwa.com

  • by on 2/1/2019, 1:59 PM

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