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HackerNews

Read every Hacker News story and comment via Firebase

💬 Social & WorkUNMONITORED
AUTH NONECORS ✓AGENT ?HTTPS ✓COMMERCIAL ?

Y Combinator's Hacker News exposes its entire item graph — stories, comments, jobs, polls, and users — through a simple Firebase REST API. Fetch any item by ID to get its author, score, timestamp, and child comment IDs. No key, and it even echoes your Origin for CORS.

—HOW IT'S SCORED ⓘ
▶ Run liveDocs ↗
Status badge · for your READMEshipapis health badge: — · unmonitored
ON PROBE SCHEDULE

We probe a documented GET and expect 2xx JSON — full uptime and health score. Open provider docs ↗

Uptime historystarts after first probe

On our probe schedule. Uptime charts appear after the first check lands.

Example responsefrom provider docs — not verified by us
GET https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json

{
  "by": "dhouston",
  "descendants": 71,
  "id": 8863,
  "score": 104,
  "time": 1175714200,
  "title": "My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive",
  "type": "story",
  "url": "http://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/screencast.html"
}
Call itcurl · fetch · python
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json"
const res = await fetch("https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json");
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data);
import requests

res = requests.get("https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json")
print(res.json())
Endpoints · 6On scheduleFULL DOCS ↗
On schedule — GET /item/8863.json awaits first probe
GET/item/8863.jsonPROBED

Read every Hacker News story and comment via Firebase

GET/item

Item — documented GET route.

GET/item/1

Item details by ID (example: 1).

GET/item?limit=10

Item — documented GET route.

GET/item/search?q=test

Search by query parameters.

GET/v0/user/

Single user profile.

Machine-readable spec

We probe a documented GET and expect 2xx JSON — full uptime and health score. Export includes every documented route below.

Response-shape history

Not tracked yet. Shape-change history starts once this API joins our probe schedule.

HackerNews: common questions

Is HackerNews free to use?

Yes — HackerNews is a free social & work API. Free tier: Free — no key required. Whether the free tier allows commercial use is unclear — check the provider docs.

Does HackerNews need an API key?

No — HackerNews needs no API key or signup. You can call it straight away; rate limits still apply (Unpublished).

Can I call HackerNews from the browser?

Yes — HackerNews returns CORS headers over HTTPS, so front-end code can fetch it directly with no backend proxy. Use the fetch snippet on this page, or hit "Run live" to try it now.

Is HackerNews up right now?

HackerNews is catalogued but not yet on our probe schedule, so we don't publish a live status for it. Check the provider's own status page or docs for its current state.