Hacker News Firebaseio Hacker News API

Name: Hacker News API
Brand: Hacker News API
Availability: InStock

★ Only Publicly Available OpenAPI DocumentSocial MediaSocial Listeningnone10 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Pull Hacker News stories, comments, user profiles, and live ranked feeds (top, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs) without authentication.

Install Jentic One Beta

Connect the Hacker News API to your agent

Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the Hacker News API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.

Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.

Step 1: Jentic One Host machine

# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh

Step 2: Agent machine

# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh
jentic register       # connects your agent to your Jentic One instance

Jentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with Hacker News API.

Fetch a single Hacker News item by id and read its title, url, score, and kids

Retrieve a user profile with karma, submitted ids, and account creation time

List the current top, new, and best story ids in ranked order

GET STARTED

Start building with Hacker News API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

Use Cases

Patterns agents use Hacker News API for, with concrete tasks.

★ Trend and Sentiment Monitor

Watch the Hacker News top and new feeds for stories matching a brand, product, or technology and surface a digest with comment sentiment. The agent polls /topstories.json and /newstories.json, fetches each item via /item/{itemId}.json, and walks the kids array to read the comment thread. Useful for PR teams, founders monitoring launch reception, and competitive intelligence.

Fetch /topstories.json, retrieve each of the top 30 stories via /item/{itemId}.json, and return any whose title or url contains the keyword 'jentic'.

Show HN Launch Tracker

Build a feed of new Show HN posts in your category and notify the team when a competing launch appears. The agent pulls /showstories.json, fetches each item, filters by keyword or domain, and posts matches to a chat channel. Setup is straightforward because the API requires no authentication.

Pull /showstories.json, fetch the first 50 items, and report any whose url matches a list of competitor domains.

Hiring Pipeline Watcher

Scrape Hacker News 'Who is hiring?' threads and the dedicated jobs feed to surface roles relevant to a candidate's profile. The agent fetches /jobstories.json, walks the items, and uses keyword matching against role descriptions. Recruiters use this pattern to source from a high-signal community without paying for a job board.

Fetch /jobstories.json, retrieve each item, and return roles whose text contains 'remote' and 'rust'.

Citation and Discussion Lookup

When a research agent encounters a URL, look up whether it has been discussed on Hacker News and surface the top comment thread. The agent searches by item id (from a third-party index) and pulls the discussion via /item/{itemId}.json. Useful for AI research assistants and content curation tools.

Given an item id 8863, GET /item/8863.json and return the title, score, and the first three top-level comment texts by walking the kids array.

Agent Discovery Through Jentic

AI agents discover Hacker News operations by searching Jentic with intents like 'list top hacker news stories' and receive the matching operation with its input schema. The agent invokes the call through Jentic without writing custom HTTP code. Because the API is unauthenticated, no vault entry is needed.

Use Jentic search 'list top hacker news stories' to find the GET /topstories.json operation and execute it to receive the top 500 ranked story ids.

Key Endpoints

10 endpoints — the official hacker news api is hosted on firebase and provides read-only access to all public hacker news data.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

GET

/item/{itemId}.json

Fetch any item by id

GET

/user/{username}.json

Fetch a user profile

GET

/topstories.json

List the current top story ids

GET

/newstories.json

List the newest story ids

GET

/askstories.json

List the latest Ask HN ids

GET

/showstories.json

List the latest Show HN ids

GET

/jobstories.json

List the latest job ids

GET

/maxitem.json

Get the maximum item id currently posted

GET

/item/{itemId}.json

Fetch any item by id

GET

/user/{username}.json

Fetch a user profile

GET

/topstories.json

List the current top story ids

GET

/newstories.json

List the newest story ids

GET

/askstories.json

List the latest Ask HN ids

Why Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

The Hacker News API is unauthenticated, so there is no credential to store; your Jentic One instance forwards the request without injecting any key. Nothing secret enters the agent's prompt, logs, or context.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'list top hacker news stories' or 'fetch a hacker news item', and Jentic returns the matching operation with its input schema so the agent calls the right endpoint without building URLs by hand.

Time to first call

FAQs

Specific to using Hacker News API through Jentic.

What authentication does the Hacker News API use?

None. The Hacker News Firebase API is fully public and read-only, so no API key, OAuth token, or signed request is needed. Agents can call any endpoint anonymously, which means no credential setup is required in Jentic.

How do I fetch a single Hacker News story and its comments?

GET /item/{itemId}.json returns the story object with its title, url, score, and a kids array of child comment ids. To build the full thread, fetch each id in kids recursively. There are no batch endpoints, so plan to make one request per node.

What live feeds does the Hacker News API provide?

The API exposes /topstories.json, /newstories.json, /beststories.json, /askstories.json, /showstories.json, and /jobstories.json. Each returns up to 500 item ids in ranked order. Combine with /item/{itemId}.json to hydrate the full story payloads.

Are there rate limits on the Hacker News API?

Hacker News does not publish formal rate limits, but sustained heavy polling will be throttled at the Firebase layer. For trend monitoring, poll the live feed endpoints every 30-60 seconds rather than continuously, and cache item payloads since they rarely change after a few hours.

How do I use the Hacker News API with AI agents through Jentic?

Run pip install jentic, then search 'list top hacker news stories' to find GET /topstories.json. Load the operation and execute. Because the API is unauthenticated, the only setup is running Jentic One, the self-hosted execution layer, to use the SDK.

Can I detect newly posted items in real time?

Yes. GET /maxitem.json returns the largest item id ever posted, and /updates.json returns recently changed items and profiles. Agents can poll maxitem and fetch any new ids since the last seen value to build a near-real-time stream.

Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the Hacker News API?

Yes. Because Jentic One is self-hosted, you set the rules that decide which Hacker News operations your agent may call, so you can grant only what it needs, such as listing top stories with GET /topstories.json or fetching a single item with GET /item/{itemId}.json, while withholding user lookups or the live update feeds. The Hacker News API is read-only, so there are no posting, voting, or commenting operations for the agent to reach in the first place. And since the API is unauthenticated, no credential is stored or injected when your instance forwards the request.