Yeah , that's fair. More than promotion i was trying to suggest i had also built something similar and kind of understand the product space. It's this dev thing, can't shake it off i guess. But i get what you meant.
Apart from that i have a theory that there is a lot of ML based ranking and classification that is happening at the backend.
Thanks. Currently i am using the HN api (https://github.com/HackerNews/API) . It's a read only API and doesn't support writes. I heard that might be away to do this with a webview initially, haven't explored that yet.
Yeah, the app is highly misleading and many people think they are official. I echo your sentiment on ads, that was one of the reason that pushed me to build this app as well.
Really liked the fact that the team shared all the shortcomings of the model in the post. Sometimes products just highlights the best results and isn't forthcoming in areas that need improvement. Kudos to the OpenAI team on that.