HackerNews

Overview

The Hacker News API exposes everything on Hacker News — top stories, Ask HN, jobs, comments, users — as JSON, keyless and free. Two flavors: the official Firebase API (IDs + item lookup) and the Algolia API (full-text search with scores). The standard data source for HN readers, bots, and analytics projects.

Quick Start

Top story IDs (official Firebase API, verified live):

curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty"

Fetch a single item by ID:

curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json?print=pretty"

New / Ask / Show / Jobs:

curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/newstories.json"
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/askstories.json"
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/showstories.json"
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/jobstories.json"

Search (Algolia API) — full-text with metadata:

curl "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=rust&tags=story"
curl "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment&query=openai"

Authentication

None — keyless.

Rate Limits & Notes

• The official Firebase API is fire-and-forget friendly but has no search; Algolia powers the HN search UI (searchable, scored).
• Items are JSON with id, title, by, score, descendants, kids (comment IDs), url (for stories) / text (for Ask HN).
• Algolia endpoints: /search (relevance) and /search_by_date (chronological), with tags=story|comment|ask_hn|show_hn|job.
• Both are free with generous limits; be polite for bulk crawls.

FAQ

Is the Hacker News API free? Yes — both the Firebase and Algolia endpoints are free and keyless.

How do I get comments for a story? Fetch the story item, then fetch each kid ID — or use Algolia search_by_date?tags=comment&story_id=....

Which API should I use? Firebase for simple listing/ranking apps; Algolia for search, comments, and historical queries.