This is one of those bits of news that you see and you think to yourself, "woah... was that not yet a thing? I just assumed that had already happened." For many developers and tech fanatics, Hacker News is already a daily visit in your browser history, so it's definitely very interesting to see they've finally released an official Hacker News API. YCombinator enlisted the help of one of their startups, Firebase, to create the API, and they utilized a YCombinator employee to create initial documentation and examples on the Hacker News Github page.

Here is a picture of the documentation on GitHub from the YCombinator blog.

They've released the API as part of a longer plan to modernize the markup and frontend of Hacker News to create a more reliable source of real-time data for readers that scrape the site for content and information. They plan to convert to a new Arc-powered engine in the next three weeks. Their whole-package plan also includes SDKs for mobile and hybrid developers, and a REST API for server applications.

This is definitely a well-timed release considering the recent API release from the New York Times that was well-received. Hopefully there are a lot of people who are going to put these tools to good use for the community.