Hacker News API

Official Firebase-based Hacker News API providing real-time access to stories, comments, jobs, and user data.

Status
🟢 Online · 344 ms

30-day uptime
100%

Free tier
Unlimited, no key, no credit card

Auth
No key required

Last 30 days

Free alternatives (live ranking)

DEV Community API — 🟢 Online · 30 calls/30s unauthenticated, no key for reads
Wikipedia REST API — 🟢 Online · Unlimited, no key, must set User-Agent
Spaceflight News API — 🟢 Online · Unlimited, no key, no credit card

Compare Hacker News API with…

Hacker News API vs DEV Community API — 30 calls/30s unauthenticated, no key for reads
Hacker News API vs Wikipedia REST API — Unlimited, no key, must set User-Agent
Hacker News API vs Spaceflight News API — Unlimited, no key, no credit card

Official docs ↗

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Hacker News API require an API key?

No, Hacker News API is freely accessible without registration or an API key.

What is Hacker News API's free tier?

Unlimited, no key, no credit card

Is Hacker News API currently online?

We check Hacker News API every hour. The current status is shown at the top of this page. You can also see the 30-day uptime history in the chart above.

Implementation notes

When to use Hacker News API

The Hacker News API is the only free tech-community news feed with no rate limit, no key, and a Firebase real-time subscription interface. Use it when you need developer-community signals — top stories, new submissions, job posts — without any account setup.

Common pitfalls

The API does not have a single endpoint that returns full story objects. The `/topstories.json` endpoint returns an array of up to 500 story IDs. Each story then requires a separate `/item/{id}.json` call. Fetching 30 stories requires 31 HTTP requests. Plan for parallel fetching.
There is no search or filter endpoint in the official API. If you need keyword search or date-range filtering, use the Algolia HN Search API (`hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search`) which is unofficial but widely used and reliable.
Comment trees can be deeply nested — a popular thread may have 5+ levels of nested `kids` arrays. Fetching an entire thread recursively against the Firebase API is expensive; each comment is a separate request.
The `score` field is read-only and reflects the current live upvote count. There is no historical score data — a story that was #1 six hours ago has no record of its peak rank in the API response.

Quick start (bash)

# Get top 5 story IDs, then fetch each item
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json" | python3 -c "import sys,json; ids=json.load(sys.stdin)[:5]; print(ids)"

From our monitoring

The Hacker News Firebase API has been 100% available in every hourly check we have run. Response times are consistently under 200ms for the top-level list endpoints.

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