As someone in big fintech who has to deal with regulated release processes, I would like to tip my hat to "oh that's a godd suggestion from one of our users - let's try that out on our front page as soon as I can commit it".
Edit: done now. I can't shake the feeling that we've been through all this before, and that's why I ended up resorting to whitespace tricks in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20352144. But let's wait and see what's broken now...
Unfortunately this still makes it a worse experience for "not crazy long" title words. Now it wraps all words if they hit the line break, eg. On the front page right now I see:
Demo of a WAM Prolog Implementation in Py
thon
Which makes it harder to read. The previous behavior would write this like:
I might be wrong but I think dang does monitor his name. I have mentioned him a few times and he swings by. Maybe just coincidence. I did email him too.
Possibly because it borked the layout, possibly because it's not necessarily a substantive post. This exact type of submission (long unbroken class name from some codebase somewhere) has been made a number of times in the past too—little is new!
The only thing that I dislike the fast, web version of HN is this desktop layout on mobile, but HN have an API and 100's of mobile clients which work exceptionally well, and a mobile client for HN can be written in hours.
The API for HN is absolute garbage (they admit to it being so too). It's also a read only API and doesn't support actions. My apps rely on scraping the page and then performing actions such as voting, commenting, favouriting, submitting posts etc.
Read-onlyness was a design choice at the time and still has its place. The main problem with the API is that it's too low-level—you have to do a bunch of work to reconstruct what actually shows up on an HN page. The next version of the HN API will give a simple JSON representation of each HN URL. Initially it will still be read-only though; then we'll see about whether to extend it to writes.
Sorry, didn't mean admitting to "absolute garbage" in a literal way. Mostly referring to statement such as:
> I'm not saying this to defend it - It's not the ideal public API, but it's the one we could release in the time we had. While awkward, it's possible to implement most of HN using it.
My words may have been a bit too harsh but I still think I have a point. The only thing I could find use of the API was to get the user's details (karma, description, date created etc). Other than that, I ended up relying on scraping.
Unfortunately, unless the JSON api offers write access, it won't be of much use for my app's use cases. Lets just hope the JSON Api isn't going to break anything major in the HTML of the site and there aren't any major re-designs of the site in the pipeline.
