

Ask HN: Why HN RSS Feed has no date? - watermel0n

I was parsing HackerNews rss feed and I cannot find anywhere in the feed published or updated dates, timestamps or whatever similar. Does anyone know why?
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argonaut
The RSS feed is just a mirror of the HN frontpage.

Date is not as relevant as points are. Remember, the vast majority of articles
are crappy and never make it to the front page. An RSS feed full of 1 point
submissions is not very useful.

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bmelton
Exactly that, and in addition, if you're pulling articles from the Hacker News
feed, you have to do more than just grab the 'most recent', because you'll get
major duplication because articles move up and down the RSS feed all day long.

The (fairly obvious) solution is just to make sure that URLs are stored as
uniques, but my 20 minute reader application overlooked that on the first
pass.

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watermel0n
Is there any possible way to get only the front page without using scraping
tools?

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bmelton
Per api.iHackerNews.com, you could do this.

    
    
        http://api.ihackernews.com/page or
        http://api.ihackernews.com/page/{nextId}
    

I just ran a GET request against those endpoints with Postman[1] and got what
looks like exactly the right data in JSON format.

[1] - [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman-rest-
clien...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman-rest-
client/fdmmgilgnpjigdojojpjoooidkmcomcm?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon)

~~~
watermel0n
Thanks! :D

