I know that.
I've not worked with the API, and there's the blessing/curse (blurse‽) that HTML is a known, if poor, standard.
API always translates to "one more thing to learn, that's applicable to a single-use case". HTML scraping / sorting I can apply across multiple sites.
That said, a standard, say, JSON packaging of website contents available on request might be fun to have.
I feel less bad hammering firebase in a "while True:" loop vs hitting HN's servers.