HackernewsRuby

A wrapper for the new Hacker News API.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'hackernews_ruby'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install hackernews_ruby

Instantiate a client like so:

client = HackernewsRuby::Client.new

Items have the following fields:

Field	Description
id	The item's unique id. Required.
deleted	`true` if the item is deleted.
type	The type of item. One of "job", "story", "comment", "poll", or "pollopt".
by	The username of the item's author.
time	Creation date of the item, in Unix Time.
text	The comment, Ask HN, or poll text. HTML.
dead	`true` if the item is dead.
parent	The item's parent. For comments, either another comment or the relevant story. For pollopts, the relevant poll.
kids	The ids of the item's comments, in ranked display order.
url	The URL of the story.
score	The story's score, or the votes for a pollopt.
title	The title of the story or poll.
parts	A list of related pollopts, in display order.

To get an item simply do:

client.get_item(834129)

This will get any item available on the API by ID such as stories, comments, polls and jobs.

Say you wanted the title of a story:

story = client.get_item(8863) #story_id
story.title
=> "My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive"

Users have the following fields:

Field	Description
id	The user's unique username. Case-sensitive. Required.
delay	Delay in minutes between a comment's creation and its visibility to other users.
created	Creation date of the user, in Unix Time.
karma	The user's karma.
about	The user's optional self-description. HTML.
submitted	List of the user's stories, polls and comments.

Say you wanted to fetch a particular #user:

user = client.get_user('jl') #userid is case sensitive
user.about
=> "This is a test"

To fetch the top 100 stories use #top_stories:

stories = client.top_stories

This will return an array of ID's. To get each story after that, just use the #get_item method like this:

stories = client.top_stories
stories.each do |story|
  resp = client.get_item(story)
  puts resp.title
  puts resp.score
  puts resp.url
end

To get the most updated Profiles & Items you can use #updated:

updates = client.updated
updates.items
=> [1212, 1214]
updates.profiles
=> [5653, 25456]

To get the latest item created you need to call #max_item:

latest = client.max_item
=> 12343

Or to get contents of the item, just method chain:

latest = client.max_item
client.get_item(latest)