Hacker News Connection

Connects your agent to the Hacker News API for stories, comments, user profiles, and rankings. Read-only access to all public data via the official Firebase API. No authentication required.

Authentication

No authentication required. The Hacker News API is public.

Endpoints

Items

• GET /item/{id}.json — Get any item (story, comment, job, poll) by ID
• GET /maxitem.json — Get the current maximum item ID

Users

• GET /user/{id}.json — Get user profile by username

Story Rankings

• GET /topstories.json — Top 500 story IDs, ranked by score
• GET /newstories.json — Newest 500 story IDs
• GET /beststories.json — Best 500 story IDs
• GET /askstories.json — Current Ask HN story IDs
• GET /showstories.json — Current Show HN story IDs
• GET /jobstories.json — Current job posting IDs

Rules

• No authentication or API key required
• No official rate limit currently — be a good citizen, limit to ~10 req/s
• All endpoints require the .json suffix
• Story list endpoints return arrays of integer IDs — fetch each item individually
• Text fields contain HTML, not plain text
• All timestamps are Unix epoch seconds
• Items can be stories, comments, jobs, polls, or poll options — use the type field to distinguish