In the last couple of days HackerNews became super slow to access from AWS (~5 min average to load a page).
Any idea what's going on? is it intentional?<p>*checked @Virgina region
I don't know anything about that, but I'm guessing you're trying to scrape HN. I use the "unofficial API" instead: <a href="http://api.ihackernews.com/" rel="nofollow">http://api.ihackernews.com/</a><p>It works, but has its own problems, specifically intermittent 500 failures. So I wrap all my requests in something that can retry them: <a href="https://github.com/leknarf/hn-notify/blob/master/hn.py" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/leknarf/hn-notify/blob/master/hn.py</a>
Sigh...My "Hacker News Reader" Android app, with 7,000 active installs, depended on a piece of Sinatra/Heroku code to do the screen-scraping. My app is dead for now. I'm going to port the code to Java and get rid of the idea of having an intermediary. I thought it was safer if the screen scraping was centralized so that I could fix it once and for all when things changed, but it worked out that it was a single point of failure.