Is there any way to get a "raw HN feed"? I imagine there are a number of interesting hacks which could be made given real-time access to a stream of submissions and votes.
Yeah, but that (a) requires scraping, and (b) only gives you the vote totals. Given a raw feed far more interesting things could be done -- say, figuring out which people tend to like the same stories as you.
The fact that people like to read HN in different ways isn't due to shortcomings in HN -- it's simply an inevitable result of the fact that HN has a large and non-homogeneous readership, and thus any one way to view HN will not satisfy everybody.
Maybe services like HN should be built up around an API where the default website is just one way to use the site.
Many sites don't like that approach because it limits their ability to serve up advertising; but for a site like HN, that would make a great deal of sense -- it has certainly worked for twitter.
