Is there a more efficient method to call the Hacker News API?

Question

I am trying to find karma (points) of each Hacker News user using the official API. I am new to programming.

The following is the code snippet I have written to get karma of one specific user. There are close to 300k user accounts on HN.

var request = require("request");

request(
    "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/pg.json",

    function (error, response, body) {
        if (!error && response.statusCode === 200) {
        console.log(JSON.parse(body).karma);
    }
});

I ran this code, but it is not fast. Is there a better way to do this?

the bottleneck is the amount of data that API returns - about 1 megabyte for the sample you provided — Jaromanda X, Nov 21 '16 at 07:18
Hmm, yea. Is there a way to make the script efficient? @lexicore answered by saying that nothing much can be done here. — Aby James, Nov 21 '16 at 09:49

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 02 '17 at 02:18

3

There is a faster way. Use the following API endpoint:

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/${username}/karma.json

For comparison, here are the elapsed times for the respective calls:

/v0/user/pg.json: 9.560ms
/v0/user/pg/karma.json: 3.061ms

answered Apr 02 '17 at 02:18

Six

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 21 '16 at 07:13

1

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/<user>.json is the only API endpoint to return karma.

So no, there is no better (available) way.

answered Nov 21 '16 at 07:13

lexicore

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Is there a more efficient method to call the Hacker News API?

2 Answers2