This article was published on October 7, 2014

Hacker News launches API with near real-time access to site’s data


Hacker News launches API with near real-time access to site’s data

When you have a site called Hacker News that’s a destination for developers, startups and anyone interested in the startup world, it only only makes sense to have an API.

Today the Y Combinator run Hacker News site announced its own API so developers will no longer have to scrape the site for information. The API is read-only for now, but the YC-backed site could enable to private per-user info using OAuth in the future.

Y Combinator explained why it has created an API for its news site:

Most importantly, the reason we released an API is so that we can start modernizing the markup on Hacker News. Because there are a lot of apps and projects out there that rely on scraping the site to access the data inside it, we decided it would be best to release a proper API and give everyone time to convert their code before we launch any new HTML.

The API is available now and examples of the API in use are available on GitHub.

➤ Hacker News API [YC]

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