DEV Community

Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

Posted on

Hacker News Has a Free API — No Key, No Auth, No Limits

#beginners #webdev #tutorial #productivity

Hacker News serves 10+ million pageviews per day. And they give away ALL their data through a free Firebase API.

No API key. No rate limits. No authentication. Just raw JSON.

The API

Base URL: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/

That's it. No signup. No OAuth. No headers needed.

Get the Top 500 Stories Right Now 

curl https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json | python3 -m json.tool | head -20
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Returns an array of up to 500 item IDs, sorted by rank.

Get Any Story's Details 

curl https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/41967900.json
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 
{
  "by": "dang",
  "descendants": 245,
  "id": 41967900,
  "kids": [41968234, 41968567, ...],
  "score": 834,
  "time": 1711234567,
  "title": "Show HN: Something cool",
  "type": "story",
  "url": "https://example.com"
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

You get: author, score, comment count, timestamp, URL, title. Everything.

Useful Endpoints

Endpoint What it returns
/topstories.json Top 500 stories (by rank)
/newstories.json Newest 500 stories
/beststories.json Best 500 stories (by score)
/askstories.json Ask HN posts
/showstories.json Show HN posts
/jobstories.json Job posts
/item/{id}.json Any item (story, comment, poll)
/user/{username}.json User profile
/maxitem.json Current max item ID
/updates.json Recently changed items

Build a "Top HN Stories" Dashboard in 15 Lines 

import requests

top_ids = requests.get("https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json").json()[:10]

for story_id in top_ids:
    story = requests.get(f"https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{story_id}.json").json()
    score = story.get("score", 0)
    title = story.get("title", "")
    url = story.get("url", "")
    comments = story.get("descendants", 0)
    print(f"{score:>4}pts | {comments:>3} comments | {title}")
    print(f"         {url}\n")
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Run it. You'll get something like:

 834pts | 245 comments | Show HN: Something cool
         https://example.com

 612pts | 189 comments | Why X is better than Y
         https://blog.example.com/post
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Monitor Any Topic on HN 

import requests, time

def monitor_hn(keywords, interval=300):
    seen = set()
    while True:
        stories = requests.get("https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/newstories.json").json()[:50]
        for sid in stories:
            if sid in seen:
                continue
            seen.add(sid)
            story = requests.get(f"https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{sid}.json").json()
            title = (story.get("title") or "").lower()
            if any(kw in title for kw in keywords):
                print(f"🔥 {story["title"]}")
                print(f"   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id={sid}")
        time.sleep(interval)

monitor_hn(["python", "rust", "ai", "llm"])
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Free monitoring. No Algolia account needed.

Get a User's Entire History 

curl https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/pg.json
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 
{
  "about": "Bug Fixer.",
  "created": 1160418111,
  "id": "pg",
  "karma": 157236,
  "submitted": [39849234, 39849233, ...]
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Paul Graham's karma: 157K. His submitted array has every story and comment he's ever posted.

Pro Tips

  1. Algolia alternative: HN also has a search API at hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=YOUR_QUERY — also free, also no auth
  2. Real-time updates: The Firebase API supports Server-Sent Events — append ?print=event to any endpoint
  3. Bulk data: If you need ALL of HN (40M+ items), use the BigQuery public dataset instead of hammering the API
  4. Comment threads: Each item's kids array contains child comment IDs — recurse to build full threads

Why This Matters

HN is where developers discover tools. If your product lands on the front page, you get 10,000-50,000 visits in 24 hours.

With this API you can:

  • Monitor when competitors are mentioned
  • Track trending topics in your niche
  • Build alerts for job posts matching your skills
  • Analyze what content performs best
  • Find early-stage startups to partner with

All free. All real-time. All without signing up for anything.

I track developer trends across HN, GitHub, and Reddit. Follow for weekly breakdowns of what's trending in tech.

Need automated data collection from any website? Email me at spinov001@gmail.com — I've built 77 production web scrapers.
Also: Neon Free Postgres | Vercel Free API | Hetzner 4x More Server
NEW: I Ran an AI Agent for 16 Days — What Works

Top comments (0)