Hacker News is where a surprising amount of technical reality gets decided. A Show HN thread can make a project; the comments under a launch are often more honest than any review site; and the front page on a given morning is the closest thing the developer world has to a shared front door. The problem has always been getting that signal out programmatically.
Anysite now covers Hacker News as a first-class source — five endpoints that return assembled, structured JSON, with API-key authentication and nothing to set up on the Hacker News side.
What the official API leaves to you
Hacker News exposes a Firebase API, and it is genuinely minimal by design. You get raw item ids and have to fetch each one; there is no full-text search; the front-page lists are arrays of ids with no content attached; and a comment thread is a tree you reassemble yourself, one recursive request at a time. For a quick script that's fine. For anything continuous — monitoring, research, enrichment — you end up rebuilding the same plumbing every time.
The Anysite endpoints return the assembled objects directly, so the plumbing is already done.
The five endpoints
- Items —
POST /api/hackernews/itemsreturns a single item (story, comment, job, or poll) by its numeric id. - Comment tree —
POST /api/hackernews/items/commentsreturns the full nested comment tree of a thread in one call, instead of a recursive id-chase. - Front-page lists —
POST /api/hackernews/items/listsreturns the top, new, best, ask, show, and job lists with full item data, not just ids. - Search —
POST /api/hackernews/items/searchruns full-text search across stories, comments, jobs, and polls — the piece the official API simply doesn't have. - Users —
POST /api/hackernews/usersreturns a user profile by username: karma, account age, and submission history.
Each call costs one credit. The full reference, with fields and examples, lives on the Hacker News endpoint page.
What it unlocks
Launch monitoring. Watch the show and new lists and a search for your product or category, and pull the comment tree the moment a relevant thread appears. A Show HN about you — or a competitor — surfaces in minutes instead of whenever someone happens to send it to you.
Developer sentiment. Search a tool or company across all of Hacker News and read the full threads behind the hits. The discussion under an "Ask HN: what do you use for X" is some of the most candid tooling intelligence on the internet, precisely because nobody is performing for a vendor.
Audience and influencer mapping. Resolve a username to karma, account age, and submission history to find and qualify the people who actually shape technical conversations — then follow what they post and comment on.
Trend and content signals. The front page and top search results are a live demand map. The questions getting attention and the launches getting upvotes are the posts, pages, and features worth your time.
A two-call example
Pull today's front page with item data, then grab the full comment tree of the top story:
import requests
BASE = "https://api.anysite.io"
headers = {"access-token": "YOUR_API_KEY"}
front = requests.post(f"{BASE}/api/hackernews/items/lists",
headers=headers, json={"list": "top", "count": 30}).json()
top = front["items"][0]
thread = requests.post(f"{BASE}/api/hackernews/items/comments",
headers=headers, json={"id": top["id"]}).json()No Hacker News account, no Firebase project, no recursive fetching, no rate-limit bookkeeping — just the assembled data.
Get started
Hacker News joins the growing list of sources Anysite covers as structured endpoints, alongside Reddit and the rest. See the Hacker News endpoint page for the full reference, or start with a free trial and pull your first front page in a single call.