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HackerNews

Read every Hacker News story and comment via Firebase

💬 Social & WorkHEALTHYchecked 5h ago
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.

96HOW IT'S SCORED ⓘ
▶ Run liveDocs ↗
Status badge · for your READMEshipapis health badge: 96 · healthy
Uptime history
100%90 days
100%30 days
380P50 · ms
1269P95 · ms
operationalpartialdownno data
Response time · last 48 checks
Fastest 56 ms, slowest 844 ms, most recent 144 ms.
Live response samplecaptured by our last successful check
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 · 6HealthyFULL DOCS ↗
Monitored path responding — GET /item/8863.json380 mschecked 5h ago
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

Stable. No schema drift observed since monitoring began — the response shape has not changed under our checks.

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 You can call it straight away; rate limits still apply (Unpublished).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?

As of our last scheduled check, HackerNews is healthy with 100% uptime over 90 days and a 380 ms median response. We re-probe it every sweep — the status badge and uptime chart above always show the latest.