I'm thinking about the same thing i.e. building a personal HN reader with Python and QT.
I have never explored the API, and I'm not a professional programmer, but allow me to describe the ideas from top of head when I read your posts:
Requirements:
1 - Self-hosted: So essentially, it's too heavy to keep the whole sites offline. However, because I always read by topic (e.g. I'd type "SICP ycombinator" in Google and read the top pages), I think one approach is to let the user enter a topic, say "SICP", as well as number of top-level stories to return, say 25, and invoke the API to return stories. The app will then dump the stories and their comments into a database with data modelling that suits for a forum.
2 - Offline access of data: Essentially what I mentioned above. The app should also allow user to remove a story (and its children), modify topics, favorite a story and create new topics. I think those are the barebone requirements. The backend would interact with the database and do updates.
3 - Query data via SQL: I think it might be too much work to parse queries, and the easiest thing to do is to just access a string as query and pass that to the database engine. Or maybe only allow user certain actions and let the backend assemble the queries.
4 - Full text search of stories and comments: Not sure what to do as my programming knowledge is very limited. I saw the second link you provided and it is very interesting.
5 - Notification of replies to comments: Maybe give user a button to update all his favorite stories.
TBH I really want to see what other people's implementations will be.
I have never explored the API, and I'm not a professional programmer, but allow me to describe the ideas from top of head when I read your posts:
Requirements:
1 - Self-hosted: So essentially, it's too heavy to keep the whole sites offline. However, because I always read by topic (e.g. I'd type "SICP ycombinator" in Google and read the top pages), I think one approach is to let the user enter a topic, say "SICP", as well as number of top-level stories to return, say 25, and invoke the API to return stories. The app will then dump the stories and their comments into a database with data modelling that suits for a forum.
2 - Offline access of data: Essentially what I mentioned above. The app should also allow user to remove a story (and its children), modify topics, favorite a story and create new topics. I think those are the barebone requirements. The backend would interact with the database and do updates.
3 - Query data via SQL: I think it might be too much work to parse queries, and the easiest thing to do is to just access a string as query and pass that to the database engine. Or maybe only allow user certain actions and let the backend assemble the queries.
4 - Full text search of stories and comments: Not sure what to do as my programming knowledge is very limited. I saw the second link you provided and it is very interesting.
5 - Notification of replies to comments: Maybe give user a button to update all his favorite stories.
TBH I really want to see what other people's implementations will be.