[paloalto80]

"scrape != API"

No kidding. He's looking to get "comments for a given thread, score of posts and comments, and user information", which you can use an HTML parser (like Hpricot if you're using Rails) to retrieve any info you need.

[paloalto80]

Care to explain why I'm being downvoted?

EDIT: If you're going to downvote, please leave an explanation to teach me what I'm missing. I'd sincerely appreciate that. Thank you.

[jodrellblank]

to teach me what I'm missing

You're being annoying. Nobody wants to screenscrape, it's awkward and fiddly and fragile and verbose and requires reverse engineering and is wasteful of bandwidth.

It really doesn't matter if you can get the information by screenscraping. The thread topic is "what would you like an API for?", not "scorn people about what they want an API for."

Care to explain why I'm being downvoted?

Because I want less of this sort of thing on HN. I want it to fall to the bottom of the page, and to discourage it in future. I cannot articulate precisely what it is that I want less of, it's a big vague fuzzy blob of things, some of which I even agree with, and your few posts here and above here are within it, so down they go.