This change was intended from the beginning, but we are still in alpha. It was a quick addition, so the HN post made it timely. The nice thing is that this isn't just a client-sensitive change. Loading a user's info is module, so those above examples should be faster and less work for our server than getting everything about someone.
I should add that we're not fundamentally opposed to some kind of query language in the API requests, but most of our API objects lend themselves pretty well to just passing a list of fields you want. The above technique is very simple and seems to work well.
Aside, it also has cross-origin support (as does search), just added for anyone who wants to interface with Keybase on another web page, in the front end.
