It sounds like a plea to be smacked with a banhammer, more than anything else.
It seems to support automating things things that are almost certainly better off left un-automated - posting, voting, commenting.
It doesn't support anything that might be interesting to automate - say, asynchronous notification on replies to me, posting or commenting on my url, mention of my name, mention of keywords I care about, etc.
It asks for HN credentials.
Nit, but still a little lame - lifts the HN favicon.
ihackernews is currently the best browser for hacker news on the mobile by far (its far better than the "app" in the android market).
this api is just extracting what he already built for ihackernews and allowing others to use it, I would be very very surprised if pg banned it, if it causes any issues then they can pretty surely be sorted out.
I think the original commenter was hinting at the opportunity for the author to provide a service on top of HN data, like monitoring posts, replies, karma levels, or providing more categorized feeds based on preferences.
It could violate terms of service as it could at its most basic level scrape Hacker News for this information, but there hasn't been any issue with it so far.
ihackernews is currently the best browser for hacker news on the mobile by far
Not really relevant to anything I said.
this api is just extracting what he already built for ihackernews and allowing others to use it
There are actually significant downsides to 'others using it'. One is that it becomes a single point of failure for anyone using it. It's essentially a proxy so one abusive user could make HN ban the whole thing and everyone else with it. Same goes for downtime, etc.
Similarly, it introduces a third party in the authentication process for relatively little value and significant risk.
I could well be missing something but I just haven't come up with very many reasons such a service is a good idea to counter the many obvious ways in which it is a bad one.
By ignoring the fact that this was built for a practical purpose, and only mentioning ways that it could be abused implied that the author had bad intentions when writing it, I was clarifying that for everyone else, he should be thanked for ihackernews at the least.
I didnt say there was no downsides to people using it, but people can figure that out for themselves, there are also significant advantages over 1. not writing code yourself, and 2. caching and sharing the load from this domain, we already know that this site has stability issues and bots can quite easily affect the load, even if all people do with this api is create new ui's for hacker news then it would be worth it, I am pretty surprised that is the only useful thing you can see it being used for, there is obviously a lot of use cases.
By ignoring the fact that this was built for a practical purpose, and only mentioning ways that it could be abused implied that the author had bad intentions when writing it
No it didn't imply anything of the sort. And whether something is built for a practical purpose or not is, in fact, not relevant to whether it's stupid or not. My point was that I think having this is a public web service is stupid and I explained why. The practical purposes you speak of could have been achieved just as easily by releasing the code so people interested in such functionality can use it as a library or host the service themselves.
It seems to support automating things things that are almost certainly better off left un-automated - posting, voting, commenting.
It doesn't support anything that might be interesting to automate - say, asynchronous notification on replies to me, posting or commenting on my url, mention of my name, mention of keywords I care about, etc.
It asks for HN credentials.
Nit, but still a little lame - lifts the HN favicon.