Octopart initially provided the official API[1] and then Algolia took over early this year[2].

[1] https://www.hnsearch.com/api [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7130590

A lot of people seem to have used the API to build cool apps.

https://hn.algolia.io/cool_apps

I would read the docs first and jump to conclusions later.

Last Show HN: http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story,show_...

Last Ask HN: http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story,ask_h...

Front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

You should be able to build something :)

Work is underway on an API to do all of this. Nick and Scott are hacking on it about three feet to my right just now. The days of scraping are numbered.

YCombinator doesn't endorse Algolia's HN API in any public way, to my knowledge. This makes it just regular third-party API—reliable, convenient, better than scraping, but hardly ‘official’. (Yes, I'm being pedantic.)

Algolia is a YC company and built the API for YC, which is as official as it gets.