Please don't break the spacebar key acting as page down.
The search text box takes all the key presses regardless of focus. I find this annoying in a 'breaks expectations' kind of way.
If its Solr or Lucene running underneath then you could use phonetic analyzer to get expected results if the spelling is not correct. I got results with'Steve Jobs'but when I tried 'Steve Jbs' I got no results. I would say getting close results is better than no results.
If there are only a few options for a variable, could you have them be expressed as part of the object returned by
http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items?pretty_print=...
Example: Type. Although it is a string, it isn't really a string field. It is a binary choice between two preset strings (comment or submission).
It would make using the schema for things much easier.
Looks like items marked [dead] in HN will show up as zombie search results -- i.e., they get returned in the search results for the items collection but the discussion field is null.
For example: filter[fields][type]=comment&filter[fields][username]=pg
...the second result there has a null discussion field. Getting the submission title &etc. would be nice.
The 'discussion' attribute contains info about the discussion that the comment belongs to. In this case the parent discussion is [dead] so the value of 'discussion' is null. Unfortunately, we don't have access to submission titles for [dead] submissions.
I'm not sure US users have noticed, but I can't use the service from Europe, Hungary. It just keeps connecting to the api, tested with latest Chrome and FF.