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Hacker News API (Firebase)

Real-time HN stories, comments and users with zero auth and no rate limit

The official Hacker News API serves all HN items (stories, comments, jobs, polls, Ask/Show HN) and user profiles as JSON over Firebase. It is read-only, fully public, and gives an up-to-the-second view of the front page and new posts. Item IDs are walked by integer to traverse comment trees.

Free tier

Free, no key

Rate limits

No published rate limit

Auth

No key

Base URL

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0

What you'd build with it

  • Build a real-time HN front-page or newest-comments feed for an agent to summarize
  • Traverse a story's comment tree to extract discussion sentiment
  • Monitor Show HN / Ask HN for new launches relevant to a topic

Key endpoints

  • GET/topstories.jsonUp to 500 current top story IDs
  • GET/newstories.jsonUp to 500 newest story IDs
  • GET/item/{id}.jsonA single item (story, comment, job, poll) by ID
  • GET/user/{id}.jsonA user profile by username
  • GET/maxitem.jsonThe current largest item ID to walk backward from
Members

Members get the runnable recipe

Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.

Tags

newssocialdevelopersfirebase