Why did you choose not to use HNKit from chpwn's news:yc? https://github.com/Xuzz/HNKit The way you do it right now seems like it would be terribly slow.
The API calls made by this app are slightly tricky. For the front-page posts, a call is made to http://hnsearch.com/bigrss and then the resulting xml is parsed to grab the unique IDs from each post. Those are then sent as a request to the actual API to get the posts. The comments, unfortunately, return as basically a totally unordered set. I create a linked list out of those, and then I turn it into a flat array based on the nested nature of the comments - so UITableView will render correctly.
The API calls made by this app are slightly tricky. For the front-page posts, a call is made to http://hnsearch.com/bigrss and then the resulting xml is parsed to grab the unique IDs from each post. Those are then sent as a request to the actual API to get the posts. The comments, unfortunately, return as basically a totally unordered set. I create a linked list out of those, and then I turn it into a flat array based on the nested nature of the comments - so UITableView will render correctly.