Be careful not to hammer the site. Your IP could be added to the blocklist if you are too aggressive:
"Yes, we block IPs that seem to be crawlers ignoring robots.txt. We've always blocked abusive IPs, but I tightened up the blocking a few weeks ago. A lot of people were crawling HN, most of them unnecessarily because they were doing things they could have done more efficiently through HNSearch's API[1]." --pg[2]
Going through the code on github to see how a HN page is parsed, was informative. I may use this to create one using Node.js. My interest is in building an intelligent agent that filters content based on my interests (example: coding, customer acquisition, hiring etc.) and notifies me on a daily or weekly basis.
NoMethodError: undefined method `url=' for #<HN2JSON::Entity:0x007fb84cd63a88>
from /Users/markburns/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/hn2json-0.0.4/lib/hn2json/parser.rb:92:in `block in get_attrs_post'
from /Users/markburns/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/hn2json-0.0.4/lib/hn2json/entity.rb:92:in `add_attrs'
from /Users/markburns/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/hn2json-0.0.4/lib/hn2json/parser.rb:91:in `get_attrs_post'
from /Users/markburns/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/hn2json-0.0.4/lib/hn2json/entity.rb:71:in `get_attrs'
from /Users/markburns/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/hn2json-0.0.4/lib/hn2json/entity.rb:56:in `initialize'
from /Users/markburns/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/hn2json-0.0.4/lib/hn2json.rb:35:in `new'
from /Users/markburns/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/hn2json-0.0.4/lib/hn2json.rb:35:in `find'
"Yes, we block IPs that seem to be crawlers ignoring robots.txt. We've always blocked abusive IPs, but I tightened up the blocking a few weeks ago. A lot of people were crawling HN, most of them unnecessarily because they were doing things they could have done more efficiently through HNSearch's API[1]." --pg[2]
[1] http://www.hnsearch.com/api
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196298