Hacker News Reader

Comment by madh | Hacker News Reader

I just bought that app after using http://www.icombinator.net for a long time. I like the app but wish it did things a little differently--default to mobilized articles, go beyond the top 30 articles, load comments more quickly--so it's great to have something to customize and hack on. Thanks!

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There is also http://ihackernews.com.

I moved from icombinator to ihackernews since ihackernews acts more like a normal web app (icombinator locks the page as it reloads and makes it hard to come back to articles). However, it has a hard time grabbing comments (most don't work right), so it's frustrating to use.

What happens is my IP gets blocked by YC. So until the traffic dies down or I change my IP address, it errors out while getting the comments (YC serves me a blank page).

That issue is actually why I went with a distributed approach to news:yc. Yeah, it's a pain: no remote updates (App Store restrictions) and a lengthy review process for each change needed (do you know about how often the markup changes, btw?), but I don't have to deal with any caching, rate limiting, or anything else this way.

(Of course, I don't even think you can do anything like that on the web (even JavaScript, cross-domain issues), so your approach is probably required there.)

It hasn't changed since I made http://ihackernews.com

You could probably get away with remotely updating some sort of declarative grammar/schema, as long as it doesn't allow arbitrary code execution.

If it isn't too slow, you could do the parsing with some remotely-updatable JavaScript, using UIWebView's stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:.

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