HackerNews

About HackerNews

The Hacker News API provides read access to Hacker News content in near real time, delivered through Firebase. It exposes stories, comments, jobs, Ask HN posts, and polls as a unified "item" type, each identified by a unique integer id and accessible at a versioned endpoint prefixed with https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/. Items carry fields such as author, creation time, text, score, title, associated URL, child comment ids, and comment counts, depending on the item type.

Firebase's client libraries are recommended for Android, iOS, and web integration, offering efficient networking and change event notifications; server-side use is also supported directly against the API. The API has no rate limit, and the maintainers note that changes to the API will be versioned, with backward compatibility guaranteed only for non-removal of required fields.

This is intended for developers who want to build applications, tools, or integrations that read Hacker News data, such as clients, aggregators, or analysis tools working with stories, comments, and related metadata.

Key features

• Real-time REST access to Hacker News items (stories, comments, jobs, Ask HNs, polls) by id
• Built on Firebase, with client libraries for Android, iOS, and web
• Retrieve item metadata including author, timestamp, score, and text (HTML)
• Traverse comment trees via kids and parent fields
• Access top-level story lists (new, Ask, Show) by walking backward from maxid
• No rate limit on API requests

Frequently asked questions