I'm starting to do 'Introduction to CS' from Udacity (http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs101/CourseRev/apr2012). I'm planning to make a Hacker news search app through the course. What do you think, is that a good idea, or not? I know there is something similar; this is my plan: the search will be executed in the domains, referred by the hacker news stories. Thank you
Unfortunately there is no API for getting access to personal information on HN (i.e. comments I have made, or stories I've upvoted). You're relegated to scraping if you want that information.
You can always get around this by throttling your web crawler. It will take a much longer time, but at least you'll be able to read HN in the meantime.
The tricky thing when doing this is knowing what rate to stop at without getting permanently banned. I built an Android Market crawler two summers ago, and luckily Google only temp bans (from my experience), so that might be an easier project without any risk.
speaking of this, there should be one. And a "http://Archive as well.
only a handful of topics make it to the top everyday, but the majority of content is high quality stuff, which if applied at a proper place would help many. What say?
