The main issue with all apps like this is not the reverse-engineering, which is relatively straightforward, but the fact that HN sits behind Cloudflare, with the WAF and ratelimiting enabled.<p>It's not possible to achieve capability-parity just *reading* HN as the API does not return comment karma, which is used to sort the view. (I think this is the subtler half of why HN reader sites never catch on - the interesting comments are never at the top, so the presented content is very noticeably that much more boring.)<p>So a while back I tried building a simple scraper component (an internal API, I guess) that would use Firebase for realtime updates, and strategically poll the site (say one request every 3-5 seconds) to get the current sort order. I never got to the Firebase part because I crashed into Cloudflare while fiddling around tuning the ratelimiting.<p>So yeah. You need full Chrome (to satisfy whatever Cloudflare's WAF throws at you) and a captcha-solving subscription (because the WAF <i>will</i> get the flyswat out when it sees your datacenter IP) to be able to do this properly - <i>especially</i> if you want to APIify this sort of thing.