Building Hacker News json api with Haskell

Wed, Aug 13, 2014

Small announcement post.

Today I launched tiny scotty server that serves json for Hacker News front page. Project source code is located on github. You can access api here.

Hacker news parser is implemented using HXT and HandsomeSoup. Json is served with help of Scotty web framework. Currently it’s running on Heroku using this ghc-7.8 buildpack.

I don’t use RSS since I’m also interested in points and amount of comments. For me HN is more about interesting links than community and conversations behind the posts. So I don’t really care about anything except front page.

Originally I started this project as a Haskell learning exercise. I hope someone will find it useful.