For anyone interested, this Ruby code will get you started hacking in the HNSearch API right away. Gets JSON response for @query and puts it into an array of submission hashes (@results):

require 'net/http'

require 'uri'

require 'json'

@query = “facebook”

url = "http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=#{C...

doc = Net::HTTP.get URI.parse(url)

jdoc = JSON.parse(doc)

jdoc["results"].each do |result_hash|

  @results << result_hash["item"]

end