HackerNews/API on Hacker News

HN's Firebase-based API ( https://github.com/hackernews/api ) makes that easy, until you want to reconstruct the threads (i.e. who replied to who) and then it's annoying. For years* I've wanted to replace that API with one we operate…

comment by dang · 2026-10-31 · in HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

HN data is accessible through the Firebase API: https://github.com/hackernews/api You don't need to as much as parse HTML to read it. Building a client by hand in C even should be pretty painless as long as you don't write your JSON parser…

comment by nateb2022 · 2026-09-28 · in Show HN: Hntui – A TUI for Hacker News

HN has an officially sanctioned API - https://github.com/hackernews/api - which makes all of this data available

comment by gregsadetsky · 2026-09-15 · in Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

They have an API endpoint you can use. https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by all2 · 2026-09-04 · in Show HN: HN Match Maker – Matching "Who Wants to Be Hired?" With "Who's Hiring?"

HN is exported to firebase, which you can hit directly, for that sort of purpose https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by fragmede · 2026-07-11 · in An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation

https://github.com/HackerNews/API/blob/master/LICENSE It's right there, you just have to click the link I shared ...

comment by moralestapia · 2026-06-25 · in Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments

Oh, now I see my comment might be a bit harsh. I didn't consider you might now know about: https://github.com/hackernews/api

comment by moralestapia · 2026-06-25 · in Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments

It's on firebase, per https://github.com/hackernews/api

comment by fragmede · 2026-06-25 · in Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments

$ wget -4 https://github.com/HackerNews/API Resolving github.com (github.com)... 140.82.114.4 Connecting to github.com (github.com)|140.82.114.4|:443... failed: Network is unreachable. $ git clone https://github.com/HackerNews/API Cloning…

comment by Dagger2 · 2026-06-23 · in Google Hits 50% IPv6

> I asked AI to scrape HN comments Did the AI use the API? (linked at the bottom) https://github.com/HackerNews/API > All this really got me thinking, with a sufficient amount of data, you could eventually make something that looks…

comment by gus_massa · 2026-05-22 · in Ask HN: Danger or Fun? encoding secret messages into HN comments

the official HN api which is firebase under the hood https://github.com/hackernews/api

comment by ramonga · 2026-04-20 · in Show HN: Open-source alternative HN front page with point highlights and search

Hacker News has an API: https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by csomar · 2026-04-09 · in Show HN: Chrome extension to filter HN comments by user karma/account age

…and phone. Honestly, any reasonably modern LLM could probably crank one out for you in 10 minutes. https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by vunderba · 2026-03-19 · in Ask HN: How do you keep up with replies to your posts/comments?

…[0] does return booleans for those fields. That is, a state, not a type of deletion or death. [0] https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by 0cf8612b2e1e · 2026-03-18 · in Show HN: Hacker News archive (47M+ items, 11.6GB) as Parquet, updated every 5m

Have you tried with https://github.com/HackerNews/API ?

comment by gus_massa · 2026-03-18 · in Ask HN: Can you access old HN posts?

…me get more details on the official Hacker News API and some specific library documentation. Fetch(https://github.com/HackerNews/API) ⎿ Received 373.8KB (200 OK) Fetch(https://pypi.org/project/hackernews-python/) ⎿ Received 3KB (200 OK)…

comment by rovr138 · 2026-01-31 · in Claude Code is your customer

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by gus_massa · 2026-01-11 · in Ask HN: Constantly updated publicly accessible HN dataset?

…not a dump per se, there is an API where you can get HN data programmatically, no scraping needed. https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by thomasmarton · 2025-12-30 · in Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite

Don't scrape. Use the API: https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by compressedgas · 2025-12-24 · in Show HN: Hackernewsd – Automate monitoring topics on Hacker News

Link to the API https://github.com/HackerNews/API (copied from the bottom of the page)

comment by gus_massa · 2025-12-04 · in Ask HN: Which post on HN has the most comments?

The community can make whatever UI it wants, using the API: https://github.com/HackerNews/API I wrote one for myself: https://hn.unlurker.com Or there are various ways to restyle the main site with a browser script.

comment by jasonthorsness · 2025-11-21 · in Ask HN: Why doesn't Hacker News improve its UI?

Perhaps @kogir, who was active on https://github.com/HackerNews/API could add the thread id.

comment by esafak · 2025-10-10 · in Hacker News Live Feed

That sounds interesting, are there any public details on this? Is it https://github.com/HackerNews/API ?

comment by lxgr · 2025-10-09 · in Hacker News Live Feed

…https://github.com/jerbear2008/hn-live And live firebase source/api (run by HN) used for this: https://github.com/HackerNews/API (just making sure it's obvious - I didn't create this site! all credits to @jerbear4328 who is here on HN -…

comment by gregsadetsky · 2025-10-09 · in Hacker News Live Feed

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by throw-the-towel · 2025-09-18 · in Ask HN: Dark Mode for HN?

https://github.com/HackerNews/API?tab=readme-ov-file You can use the API to find some of these answers.

comment by Jtsummers · 2025-07-27 · in Ask HN: What is the average karma points of HN users?

Thanks. Currently i am using the HN api ( https://github.com/HackerNews/API ) . It's a read only API and doesn't support writes. I heard that might be away to do this with a webview initially, haven't explored that yet.

comment by krishnasangeeth · 2025-07-08 · in Show HN: HN client app that remembers reading history

…) as per their api documentation [1], it might be linked to firebase, which might explain this? [1] https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by rldjbpin · 2025-06-13 · in GCP Outage

…for a long time. We don't publish data to them except in the sense that we publish it to everybody: https://github.com/HackerNews/API . I think their page gives a misleading impression that the project is somehow official, when it's not (…

comment by cwillu · 2025-05-20 · in Show HN: Chat with 19 years of HN

…for a long time. We don't publish data to them except in the sense that we publish it to everybody: https://github.com/HackerNews/API . I think their page gives a misleading impression that the project is somehow official, when it's not (…

comment by dang · 2025-05-18 · in Show HN: Chat with 19 years of HN

…learn about how we think about these things [1]). There are plenty of ways of examining the data: - https://github.com/HackerNews/API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644563 - https://hn.algolia.com/ -…

comment by tomhow · 2025-04-23 · in Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data

…the Text-to-Speech accessibility button in their browser, really (albeit with better voices). [0]: https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by sebastiennight · 2025-04-17 · in Show HN: HN Watercooler – listen to HN threads as an audio conversation

…com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/29693#issuec... And ofc, for those that don't know, the official API https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by leetrout · 2025-04-17 · in Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/perching_aix.json... it's fairly easy to export your data. I find the quality level comes and goes on HN, but overall it's still much higher than anywhere else…

comment by luckylion · 2025-04-13 · in A Reddit bot drove me insane

…to look at publicly [5] [1] https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-... [2] https://github.com/HackerNews/API?tab=readme-ov-file [3] https://hn.algolia.com/api [4] https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a97ba432-d6dd…

comment by jimniels · 2025-03-27 · in The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

It's public... You can download the whole thing https://github.com/HackerNews/API Gets surveilled by people like me. Trying to find "interesting" content in a large archive is pretty difficult, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344…

comment by PaulHoule · 2025-03-12 · in Tell HN: US Government is surveilling HN

…the "Top Comments" is sourced from the "kids" field of the "items" endpoint. As the API docs ( https://github.com/HackerNews/API?tab=readme-ov-file#items ) says, it is "in ranked display order" so I just used it to sort the top comments.

comment by burmecia · 2024-09-25 · in Show HN: Insights.hn – Real-time Hacker News posts and comments analytics

I misread completely and read "this site" as hn, which greatly confused me because: https://github.com/HackerNews/API Then I realized I also didn't get the sarcasm.

comment by dgfitz · 2024-08-28 · in A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily

> Fairly certain HN itself is built on [firebase] The HN API is indeed https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by mtmail · 2024-08-07 · in Years later, Google still has no Firebase mobile app. So I built it

…to the world for the specific purpose of making it easy for anyone to analyze our comments here. ( https://github.com/HackerNews/API ) No comments you write on the Internet have ever been temporary. They stopped even pretending to be so…

comment by pjlegato · 2024-07-26 · in Mapping Hacker News to find who knows what in the HN community

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by gabrielsroka · 2024-07-10 · in I created a Hacker News redesign

Are you crawling the HN via the normal website? It’s better to use the API. https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by codetrotter · 2024-07-03 · in Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

…enough, initially I allowed usernames to be case sensitive because of what was said on this API https://github.com/HackerNews/API?tab=readme-ov-file#users . But after feedback ( https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mmarian#40857404 )…

comment by mmarian · 2024-07-03 · in Show HN: Get notified of replies/comments on HN (or view in-browser)

…I'll update both asap. Funnily enough, I assumed the usernames are case-sensitive based on this https://github.com/HackerNews/API?tab=readme-ov-file#users so I didn't bother testing. I was wrong :)

comment by mmarian · 2024-07-02 · in Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2024)

…you point to does not cover HN posts. [1] https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenPipe/hacker-news [2] https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by neutralino1 · 2024-06-12 · in Show HN: Semantic clusters and embeddings for 500k Hacker News comments

…dataset is entirely 3rd party, based on the public HN data (presumably via the HN Firebase API - https://github.com/HackerNews/API ), so anyone is free to do this.

comment by dang · 2024-06-12 · in Tell HN: Hacker News BigQuery dataset is updated daily again

Or HN's actual API, which isn't rate limited: https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by krapp · 2024-06-11 · in Show HN: Markdown HN profiles at {user}.at.hn

fwiw, the API (described here https://github.com/HackerNews/API ) will just give you json, eg https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/40564831.json?pri...

comment by fragmede · 2024-06-03 · in HN-text: an easy-to-use, text-first Hacker News terminal client

Hey! This leverages the official HN API ( https://github.com/HackerNews/API ), no scraping involved. I don't think it's my place to opine on "who owns the posts".

comment by jnnnthnn · 2024-05-17 · in Show HN: I built a LLM-powered Ask HN: like Perplexity, but for HN comments

…⁰ using the official HN API ¹ ⁰ https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/... ¹ https://github.com/HackerNews/API

comment by gabrielsroka · 2024-04-18 · in Ask HN: Is there a way to customize the stories on Hacker News?