news-yc

I scrape inside the app using a combination of libxml2, a custom XML wrapper for iOS, and then a horribly ugly (but pretty adaptable) chunk of objective-c to parse out the contents. This helps mostly for rate limiting issues: each device is rate limited as it should be.

I don't use the iHackerNews API for news:yc. It seemed too unreliable to use a third party service that seemed to keep having issues, and I didn't want user data to go through a third party. But I think it's cool to easily create a HN app without rewriting the scraping.

I didn't even realize there was a contest until this morning, but I merged in qhoxie's pull request to news:yc (listed as "iPhone App" in the voting options) yesterday, and I have to say, it works quite well.

I'm in the process of submitting a build of news:yc with the search support to the App Store now, so look for it in a week or two. Thanks again qhoxie for the patch!

That's actually the full app. news:yc is open source, and I want anyone to be able to use it, even if they don't want to (or can't) pay. Since building the app yourself isn't always easy (or possible), I submitted it there so anyone could install it easily.

Yeah, I've seen that too. I really don't know what causes it, but I'm definitely going to investigate for the next release.