Ask HN: Is there an API for HN ?

Thanks, I've been looking for that for a while. Is that linked anywhere?

At the bottom of the page.

I built the HN iPhone app. (http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/)

Right now, it's all done via web scraping. I think others have used BeautifulSoup.py and similar tools to quickly grab content.

I've also seen a few people use Yahoo Pipes, although that was blocked for a while.

You can download the Arc tarball and read news.arc to see what's available. It's not up-to-date with the current version of Hacker News, but it will give you the general idea.

The direct answer to your question is "no".

Depending on the 'timeliness' you can scrape the google cache or you can ask Paul if it is ok to scrap HN directly.

Please don't think this a trollish answer but, why not just ask the people behind the various HN apps how they're getting their data.

Like whom besides searchyc