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javascriptnode.jshacker-news-api

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

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?

Solution

  • 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