Any tips on respectfully crawling HN so you don’t get throttled? I had an application idea that could not be served by the API (need karma values) so I started to write code to scrape but got rate limited pretty quickly.
I've had no trouble hitting the Firebase API at the speed items are created, with a 5 second delay between retries.
For scraping HN directly, in my experience you have to go extremely slow, like 1 minute between fetching items. And if you get blocked, it may be better to wait a long time (minutes) before trying again rather than exponential backoff, in order to get out of the penalty box. You'll need a cache for sure.
{
"by" : "jkarneges",
"id" : 45533018,
"kids" : [ 45533616 ],
"parent" : 45532549,
"text" : "The HN/Firebase API doesn't make this easy. For <a href=\"https://hnstream.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://hnstream.com</a> I ended up crawling items to find the article.",
"time" : 1760043552,
"type" : "comment"
}
"parent" can either be the actual parent comment or the parent article, depending where in the comment chain you are.
ryandrake|4 months ago
jkarneges|4 months ago
For scraping HN directly, in my experience you have to go extremely slow, like 1 minute between fetching items. And if you get blocked, it may be better to wait a long time (minutes) before trying again rather than exponential backoff, in order to get out of the penalty box. You'll need a cache for sure.
esafak|4 months ago
zamadatix|4 months ago