Hacker News API — Hacker News now has an API. Awesome. :)

@rrhoover awesome. @tkalimov and i are eager to check this out. pretty soon, would love to see the PH of tools built on top of HN!

@josephkerns I can't wait to see some PH + HN mashups. Our hackathon is happening in just a few weeks (RSVP here)!

@rrhoover excellent - signed up! may be able to talk to folks about hosting in NYC if I can get the details - joe (at) roundview (dot) co

@josephkerns Hmmm...we're constantly tweaking things on the backend to improve story and comment quality. If someone built something that gave us better insights than we do, that would always grab our attention. Most people tend to build their own readers.

@ilikevests great initiative, you should enable issues in the Github repo tho, lots of feedbacks incoming.

@rrhoover What we really wanted to do was release new markup and have HN be mobile optimized. We actually finished a first version months ago, however, we realized a lot of people used scraping to build their apps on top of HN data. We thought it would be not cool to just change it overnight on them and so we released an API to allow them to switch to something better.

@ilikevests that's commendable and shows that you really care about the community. Many others probably wouldn't go through the effort of offering support for "non-official" apps.

@rrhoover other answer "because product hunt is killing it right now and they have an API so we need to innovate a bit."

@mulligan haha, when Hacker News split out "Show HN" into their own section, people started making comparisons to Product Hunt and making claims that YC was competing with one of its portfolio companies (ie, Product Hunt). I certainly don't see it this way and I'm not spinning marketing speak. As I told @carmeldea when she interviewed me on the topic, HN and PH have significantly different types of communities and the products that emerge emphasize this. As we expand, we're start to diverge even more.

@ilikevests Awesome job with the API. Let me know if I can help with documentation! @readmeio would be an awesome fit. greg@readme.io http://www.producthunt.com/posts...

@gkoberger Very cool! I checked you guys out awhile ago when you were on HN and the product looks super sharp. We'll probably do our own documentation just because I believe in owning that, but I have some ideas that might be easier to use @readmeio on in the future.

@ilikevests totally understand :) let me know if you ever do use it; I'll upgrade your account. Congrats again; looking forward to making something with the API!

@ilikevests Can you write to HN on it, or is it read only?

@tzhongg There is not. We'll probably make a mobile optimized version of the site first. Hopefully, as the API gets better over time, people will be able to build mobile apps better than we probably could.