[dang]

I'm sorry you just invested a lot of time in scraping. I know from experience what a pain that is. We said several times that the API was coming, and I've made it clear to anyone who asked, but there's just no way to reach everybody. All: in the future, please get answers to questions like this by emailing [e-mail].

Re write access and logged-in access, if that turns out to be how people want to use the API, that's the direction we'll go. But we think it's important to launch an initial release and develop it based on feedback. There are many other use cases for this data besides building a full-featured client: analyzing history, providing notifications, and so on. It will be fascinating to see what people build!

[airlocksoftware]

I'm not blaming you. It just feels bad, you know? I'll definitely email you in the future about stuff like this. And don't get me wrong, it will be great to be able to throw out the cruft that comes along with parsing the current layout. The app is engineered to be able to drop in a new API pretty quick since I thought something like this would happen eventually.

It would help me out a lot if the current front end would live on under oldnews.ycombinator.com like that until the new API has write access, though. I think it's pretty cool to be able to be reading an article somewhere else, click "Share" in Android and have "Submit to HN" pop up in the results.

[Livven]

I second that request. Having a subdomain point to the current layout for a little longer is definitely going to help the transition, especially for write access and platforms without Firebase SDKs.