I moved from icombinator to ihackernews since ihackernews acts more like a normal web app (icombinator locks the page as it reloads and makes it hard to come back to articles). However, it has a hard time grabbing comments (most don't work right), so it's frustrating to use.
What happens is my IP gets blocked by YC. So until the traffic dies down or I change my IP address, it errors out while getting the comments (YC serves me a blank page).
That issue is actually why I went with a distributed approach to news:yc. Yeah, it's a pain: no remote updates (App Store restrictions) and a lengthy review process for each change needed (do you know about how often the markup changes, btw?), but I don't have to deal with any caching, rate limiting, or anything else this way.
(Of course, I don't even think you can do anything like that on the web (even JavaScript, cross-domain issues), so your approach is probably required there.)
