Yeesh. I know this is Hacker News and we all appreciate a good hack, but what are the chances of having a real api for this type of thing? For instance, is there a way to programmatically get the list of all articles I've ever upvoted (the "Saved" page)? Or to put "You like this" alongside the HN like button if you've already upvoted it?
Here is the link to HN search API: http://www.hnsearch.com/api
I always thought part of the fun was having to hack together an ad hoc script to grab the data you wanted. That's the "hacker" way, isn't it? ;)
Note the lovely domain names sprinkled all over the popup, none related to yc.com. The iframe indeed points at news.ycombinator.com, and I have a HN cookie, so I have no idea why it shows the login form.
That said, it would be nice if this button scouted HN for the page URL and simply notified users that a discussion with X comments was taking place here.
This solution would reduce the amount of gaming that one could do to vote a post up, but would let dedicated readers know where to look. Thoughts?
It could be argued that hacker news should implement frame busting for additional security, but I don't think it is a huge concern for this site.
At a former company I worked at our CTO likened our product which had many warts to a machine with many levers. He then went on to compare our customers to monkeys that we had trained to pull the levers in the right order. Pull them in the wrong order and you get an electric shock or something.
Every time I see a cluster of like buttons on a web page I think of monkeys and levers.
This functionality could totally be implemented on the server end. When you submit a link it could tell you that the story was already submitted and when.
Wishing the like buttons would just go out of fashion...
Someone else had mentioned that it would be an issue trying to do this by scraping, but this could just as easily be done this way. The downside of course (like someone else had mentioned) is that HN users would need to enter in their username/password to perform the scrape to count current post points and the scrape to upvote posts, and if they didn't see ycombinator.com in the URL they would be skeptical in providing these details because an unscrupulous hacker could then use those logins (if they stored them) to upvote all of their own posts. If others are interested in the scrape version of this hack I could make it ...The upside to the scrape hack version would be the fact that the UI could be adjusted as needed, but like others mentioned HN isn't know for it's elegant UI to begin with...it's more about simplicity
