wow - the money quote "I scraped Hacker Slide to get just over two months of data in the form of hourly snapshots of stories, their age, their score and their position" -- how did he do this? I can barely get to the homepage say 14 times out of 20, without hitting the error page from their CDN/DDOS Protection pages (cloudfare?)
And that's not to scrape content, just to read the headlines from time to time.