
Show HN: Mobile-Friendly Hacker News Reader Running on ASP.Net Core - DougWebb
http://webbindustries.com/hackernews
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DougWebb
Author here. I read Hacker News pretty much every day, usually on my phone,
and the interface has always been a problem. So over the years I've written a
number of wrappers to provide my own interface, first using screen-scraping
and now using the official Hacker News API.

This is the latest iteration, written using Bootstrap 4 (Beta) for the GUI and
a custom ASP.Net MVC Core 2.0 backend that uses System.Net.WebClient to talk
directly to the Hacker News API. The API is pretty awful for a web API, which
is why my client uses AJAX to retrieve all of the stories and comments
individually and child comments have to be expanded and retrieved on-demand.
There's caching behind all of that to reduce the number of API calls, and
someday HTTP/2 will make the concurrent AJAX requests a little more
reasonable, but for now this is what it is. The API doesn't support any of the
interactive features of Hacker News, so on the right the "Hacker News" links
take you to the real GUI so you can vote, add replies, etc.

