HN is exported to firebase, which you can hit directly, for that sort of purpose

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

I know that.

I've not worked with the API, and there's the blessing/curse (blurse‽) that HTML is a known, if poor, standard.

API always translates to "one more thing to learn, that's applicable to a single-use case". HTML scraping / sorting I can apply across multiple sites.

That said, a standard, say, JSON packaging of website contents available on request might be fun to have.