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I should add that HNSearch has an API

http://www.hnsearch.com/api

which should be a lot faster than crawling HN itself to get the same data.

View on HN

So after some quick hacking I created a new HN bookmarklet based on the new API:

http://kaspa.rs/hn-bookmarklet/

If the current URL is added, it will go straight to discussion thread (without voting). If not, it will ask if you want to submit it.

Why not model it after the submission page (submit or upvote)?

Original HN bookmarklet already works that way http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html

However - I don't always want to upvote a post just because I want to check the discussion. Published this with an assumption that I'm not the only one.

I'm already working on integrating the api in unscatter.com using a /hn tag - http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=%2Fhn+facebook (currently only functional)

I will be super cool if JSONP support is added. If we want to build web app with JavaScript it is much easier to use directly JSONP.

When I build this web app http://www.vcarrer.com/2010/11/hacker-news-mobile-front-page... I need to use Yahoo YQL to obtain JSONP.

So pretty please, add JSONP.

There is already JSONP support, see callback argument:

http://www.thriftdb.com/documentation/rest-api

Cool! Thanks!

This is cool, but the API looks a bit cryptic. Is there a way to simply lookup an item by URL?

Edit: Nevermind, figured it out: http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?prett...

Or, by "id"? I looked, but I wasn't able to figure out, for example, how I'd get pg's top-level comment here from the id "2619846". I was able to find it with this search, but it requires a second-part to the "_id" that I don't know where to find: http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=... (Trying to filter for "id" instead of "_id" throws an error, for some reason.)

The `_id` attribute for each item is its submission id plus a signature. ThriftDB references objects by their unique `_id` attributes.

The `id` attribute on the other hand is an item's submission id. It's not indexed though so you can't do lookup by id.

could you please index the submission ids? i can think of a few reasons this would be useful

Would you mind emailing me with your ideas? andres@octopart.com

Exactly.

How do I find this comment through the API? How do I find its replies?

Well that explains why I failed at fetching an item by id, and I tried a whole bunch of different ways. You should really mention somewhere that the "id" referenced is an internal id, and not the HN id.

I would like to lookup items by HN id.

The API docs are a work in progress. Please let me know which parts need work.

For example what's the difference between "filter[queries][]" and "q" arguments for http://www.thriftdb.com/documentation/rest-api/search-api? The way I understand, q does a simple keyword matching on all fields while "filter[queries][]" is more like SQL "where" query. In that case, what operators are supported?

The `q` argument is used to perform a full-text search across all fields. One benefit to using `q` is that you can rank results based on field matches (using the `weights` argument).

The `filter` arguments are used to cut the data before performing a full-text query:

`filter[fields][fieldname]` can be used to filter on fieldnames:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...

`filter[queries][]` can be used to add arbitrary filters:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...

The syntax for filter queries is the same as solr:

http://wiki.apache.org/solr/CommonQueryParameters#fq

Should be faster for the developer and also good for HN's servers to not have so many independent apps scraping the forum.

Browser notification when someone comments on your post. Would that be useful?

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