How hard is it to export all of the comments someone has written on HN? I have been thinking about converting my HN comment history into something like a blog. Each entry would show the title of the submission, link if applicable, and the comment and link to comment thread.
Maybe you could provide that service for a small fee.
Yes, but with the algolia API, you'll need to make way fewer requests, as you'll get up to 50 comments per API call + you also get the title and URL of the post where this comment was posted in the same call.
I wrote a simple program a while ago to just download all of https://qht.co/threads?id=arp242, with my cookie set. Upshot of this is that it will include scores and flagged comments, which public sources won't have. It's useful to filter comments.
To be honest I don't remember what the exact status is; it should work because I have a large TOML file with all my comments. But I don't recall if there's anything "TODO" or if I just forgot to publish it.
Need to put your cookie in the variable at the top.
Please remember that users gave a license to their content only to HN, not everyone. Using their data without their consent might come afoul of copyright laws.
> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
It says here I grant Y combinator (and its affiliated companies; hm...) a licence, not that I grant it to some rando with a scrapper (or using an API). Anyone that's not Y combinator (and its affiliated companies; hm....) that's using my content posted here is doing so without any licence to do so from me, potentially violating my copyright rights.
>So if you put a photo up on instagram I can yoink it and use it as I see fit?
We're talking about Hacker News, not Instagram.
>It says here I grant Y combinator (and its affiliated companies; hm...) a licence, not that I grant it to some rando with a scrapper (or using an API).
And yet Hacker News has an API and plenty of people use it, implying that Hacker News considers the use of its own API to be valid within the context of its "license" and by extension any application also using the API.
Feel free to lawyer up and sue, though, and let us know how it goes. I don't think it'll go as well as you seem to believe.
Maybe you could provide that service for a small fee.
https://github.com/runvnc/hncomments