I found these the other day and I wonder how these have largely slipped under the radar. Of particular interest is hxpipe and hxunpipe which makes "scraping" tasks absurdly easy, by converting html to a form easily manipulatable by sed, grep and other fun unix utilities.

update: tracking the score of this post on the front page using this:

    curl -s https://news.ycombinator.com/news | hxnormalize | hxpipe | grep -C 20 "TheZenPsycho" | grep points
    -9\n                    points