This project is inspired by a thread of Hacker News, asking this question

"I have the idea of an app that is mostly about communicating with an API on the WEB. It feels a considerable overkill for an Electron App. The size of a hello world app in Electron is 100x the size of my backend!
On the business side, I understand that many people on HN prefer to ship that spend time on technologies discussions.

But if you have the time, and your goal is to do something maintainable, reasonably close the most to the Desktop, and well-integrated to the OS, what tech/stack will you use?

Windows/Linux GTK/MacOS"

Here we're using Lazarus, with initial development happening on a laptop running Windows 10

I'll then port it to run on Ubuntu in a virtual machine

I don't have a Macintosh to try it out on


As an MVP this program will
  Allow the user to put in a thread ID on hacker news
  Make appropriate calls to  https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/ to retrieve the thread, and all of its comments in a truee
  Display the thread and its comments in a suitable tree inside the GUI
  Have a menu, tool tips, and save state (at least the thread ID)


Documentation sources:
  https://github.com/HackerNews/API - fairly good documentation about the API which can be used to retrieve HN posts

  http://lazplanet.blogspot.com/2019/03/how-to-get-contents-of-url-in-2-ways.html
    shows how to properly use the HTTP client component

  https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,30162.msg191493.html
    gives hints about how to use json and the json parser


