Are things like these just proof-of-concepts, or are there many people out there that use these? It's things like this that are just promoting the joke that "Emacs is a great OS, but lacks a good text editor." (Honest question)
I use emacs for email and news reader (gnus), Irc (rcirc), jabber (jabber.el), twitter (twittering-mode), calculator, password storage (PGP encrypted file), and sysadmining (remote/sudo file editing with tramp).
And I use it as my primary development envrionment. I get the same text editor capabilities if I'm writing a tweet, email or code. And yes, vim is a far superior editor. Luckily emacs implements that as well (evil or viper).
In case anyone else is tempted: I tried to add the "new" page, and additional pages of the main results - however the API that drives this ( http://api.ihackernews.com/ ) has been failing to return those pages for several hours now. I'm assuming that the functionality was dropped at some point...
Hmm, bad news. I'll work on polishing the new proxy support that is almost done in another branch, so we'll be able to use more reliable services for now.
And then, when I have some time, I'll write the full thing on lisp! Thanks for the heads up!
So, hackernews.el is actually a very simple front-end for the guy that really has to deal with hackernews. I'm using a library that I built on top of `ruby-hackernews`, you can see what I did here: https://github.com/clarete/rhn
If you install it through the package manager (by running M-x package-list-packages and then selecting it from there) you can update it through that as well (hitting U will select all updates). See eg: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_package_system.html
http://mashable.com/2011/07/03/hardlyworkin-excel-facebook/