Free APIDev ToolsNo keyOfficial
Hacker News API
Official keyless Firebase feed of HN stories, comments and rankings in near real time.
The official Hacker News API, hosted on Firebase, exposes every item (stories, comments, jobs, polls), the top/new/best/ask/show/job story lists, user profiles, and the latest max item id, all as plain JSON. No key, no auth, near real-time. It is the canonical source for tech-community headlines and discussion, ideal for a Claude Skill that surfaces or summarizes trending tech news. Verified live in June 2026: topstories returns 500 ids and item lookups resolve correctly. For full-text/date search, pair it with the separate Algolia HN Search API.
Free tier
Free, official, no API key.Rate limits
Not published. No documented rate limit, but aggressive hammering can get you temporarily blocked; cache and batch.Auth
No keyBase URL
https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0What you'd build with it
- Summarize the current HN front page into a daily brief
- Detect and alert on stories crossing a score/comment threshold
- Mine top discussions for a tech-trends RAG index
- Pull a user's submission history for profiling
Key endpoints
- GET
/topstories.jsonUp to 500 top story item ids, ranked. - GET
/newstories.jsonUp to 500 newest story item ids. - GET
/beststories.jsonUp to 500 best story item ids. - GET
/item/{id}.jsonFetch a single item (story, comment, job, poll) by id. - GET
/user/{id}.jsonFetch a user profile by username. - GET
/maxitem.jsonThe current largest item id (for incremental crawling).
Members
Members get the runnable recipe
Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.
Tags
technewskeylessfirebasesocial