I love Hacker News, and appreciate that they have a feed for the stories that make it to the front page. But I want more. I want to get a stream of stories, as they are submitted. For that I'd need a feed that they don't have. 

I asked about this on Hacker News, of course, and found that a clever developer in Texas, Ronnie Roller, had cobbled together an API by scraping the HTML of the website. It was a simple matter to create a tool that coverts the data from JSON to RSS, which is what I did in a couple of hours last night. 

http://static.scripting.com/hackernews/rss.xml  

That's the feed, but you'll note that it hasn't updated since early this morning. Apparently that's because Hacker News has blocked his API.  

That doesn't seem consistent with the philosophy of the site. We're just playing with data and apps to see if there's something there worth developing. That's the only reason we like having the API, and Ronnie is running it entirely on his own dime. 

So this is an appeal to whoever decides these things. Let us do this work. Or even better, provide us with an offical sanctioned API that connects directly to the database behind the HTML.