citricsquid

14 tahun yang laludiscuss

This might be helpful: http://api.ihackernews.com/

edit: oh, official API is above. Disregard this one :-)

14 tahun yang laludiscuss

I manage a large forum and we use BBCode. I recently "open sourced" our rules (https://github.com/minecraftforum/rules) and during building the system you see there I made the decision to opt to use Markdown over BBCode -- what everyone that uses the forum is used to.

BBCode isn't inherently "bad" if you're just writing something and won't ever edit it again but for anything that you will need to edit / review in the future it can be a serious pain in the ass to look through.

These are the two examples I used:

    ### Title here
    This is some text [with a url](http://google.com)

vs.

    [size=6][font=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Title here[/font][/size]
    This is some text [url="http://google.com"]with a url[/url]

BBCode was written to be written, it's no more difficult to write

    [url=http://google.com]google[/url]

than it is to write:

    [google](http://google.com)

but when reading the source (for maintaining) it... sucks, because it feels un-natural. With the Markdown version of linking (to pick a basic example) you can read a sentence how the person reading the processed version would read it:

    A search engine called [google](http://google.com)

That reads as "A search engine called google" and then you see that google is a hyperlink. With BBCode it would read:

    A search engine called [url=http://google.com]google[/url]

So first you read "A search engine called" then you see it's a URL and then you see "google". It can get very frustrating when you're looking at huge swathes of text written in a similar style.

citricsquid

14 tahun yang laludiscuss

What's the reasoning behind your loathing?

citricsquid

14 tahun yang laludiscuss

an ID can refer to a comment or a link, you can find the latest comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments latest links: http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

The easiest way to do it would be to pick an ID in the future (say 20 ahead of the latest one) then type the title and link out, then just keep refreshing the page for your selected ID minus one (for example, if your chosen ID is 3743040 refresh news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3743039) until you get a result then hit submit, if you're not too slow you'll get the ID 3743040.

citricsquid

14 tahun yang laludiscuss

IDs are sequential, you can predict them with ease. For example (without editing) I can tell you my comment ID (for this comment) will be: 3743005

(edit: nope, I was 3 off, you get the point though, apparently a lot of people are commenting at the moment, ha)

citricsquid

14 tahun yang laludiscuss

I had always assumed this was impossible because my votes have an auth key attached. Does this mean that the auth key is not used and is just there to trick casual observers into thinking there is security?

    vote?for=3742852&dir=up&by=citricsquid&auth=478876d54494692615d9f2ca184fa9fab2fb9ff7&whence=%69%74%65%6d%3f%69%64%3d%33%37%34%32%37%34%32