Hacker News needs you to be logged in to your account for upvoting and does not provide a programmatic way to do that on your behalf. I remembered from earlier experiences that a resubmission (once per user) counted as an upvote.
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?
Sure, scraping works for operations that don't require login. But we're seeing more and more "apps for HN," and it would be nice if they could authenticate and do nifty things without me giving up my HN password.
Scraping works for operations that require login as well. You just have to start with the login process and hold onto the cookie it gives you after you post to the login form. As long as you continue to send your cookie along with each request you'll be able to access any information you want, as well as automate things like voting (not recommended). I haven't seen anything that asks for my HN password yet. Usually they just ask you to create a separate account with them and will scrape your profile looking for an authentication string to verify your HN account. What apps are you referring to?
Edit: Nevermind, you're referring to scraping only working in scenarios where you're the one doing the scraping -- not some external service. In that case, an API would be useful. I'm not sure about the usefulness of the apps though...
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?