They actually even admit that the API garbage. They say:

> "The v0 API is essentially a dump of our in-memory data structures. We know, what works great locally in memory isn't so hot over the network. Many of the awkward things are just the way HN works internally. Want to know the total number of comments on an article? Traverse the tree and count. Want to know the children of an item? Load the item and get their IDs, then load them. The newest page? Starts at item maxid and walks backward, keeping only the top level stories. Same for Ask, Show, etc. I'm not saying this to defend it - It's not the ideal public API, but it's the one we could release in the time we had. While awkward, it's possible to implement most of HN using it."

If one wants to get the comments for a post on HN from the API, they have to first fetch the post, then fetch every single comment of the post 1 by 1. So if the post has 500 comments, one has to basically send over 500 network requests......

They did say that they plan on released a better API in the future. However, as far as I know, it will be read only initially. So won't be much useful for my app.