In partnership with Firebase, we're making the public Hacker News data available in near real time. Firebase enables easy access from Android, iOS and the web. Servers aren't left out; there's also REST support.
If you can use one of the many Firebase client libraries you really should. The libraries handle networking efficiently and can raise events when things change. Be sure to check them out.
Please email [email protected] if you find any bugs.
The API is based at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com.
We hope to improve it over time, and may later enable access to private per-user data using OAuth. The changes won't always be backward compatible, so we're going to version the API. This first iteration will live at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/ and is structured as described below.
The v0 API is essentially a dump of our in-memory data structures. We know, what works great locally in memory isn't so hot over the network. Many of the awkward things are just the way HN works internally. Want to know the total number of comments on an article? Traverse the tree and count. Want to know the children of an item? Load the item and get their IDs, then load them. The newest page? Starts at item maxid and walks backward, keeping only the top level stories. Same for Ask, Show, etc.
I'm not saying this to defend it - It's not the ideal public API, but it's the one we could release in the time we had. While awkward, it's possible to implement most of HN using it.
Stories, comments, jobs, Ask HNs and even polls are just items. They're identified by their ids, which are unique integers, and live under https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/.
All items have some of the following properties:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| id | The item's unique id. Required. |
| deleted | true if the item is deleted. |
| type | The type of item. One of "job", "story", "comment", "poll", or "pollopt". |
| by | The username of the item's author. |
| time | Creation date of the item, in Unix Time. |
| text | The comment, story or poll text. HTML. |
| dead | true if the item is dead. |
| parent | The item's parent. For comments, either another comment or the relevant story. For pollopts, the relevant poll. |
| kids | The ids of the item's comments, in ranked display order. |
| url | The URL of the story. |
| score | The story's score, or the votes for a pollopt. |
| title | The title of the story, poll or job. |
| parts | A list of related pollopts, in display order. |
| descendants | In the case of stories or polls, the total comment count. |
For example, a story: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json?print=pretty
{
"by" : "dhouston",
"descendants" : 71,
"id" : 8863,
"kids" : [ 8952, 9224, 8917, 8884, 8887, 8943, 8869, 8958, 9005, 9671, 8940, 9067, 8908, 9055, 8865, 8881, 8872, 8873, 8955, 10403, 8903, 8928, 9125, 8998, 8901, 8902, 8907, 8894, 8878, 8870, 8980, 8934, 8876 ],
"score" : 111,
"time" : 1175714200,
"title" : "My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive",
"type" : "story",
"url" : "http:https://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/screencast.html"
}comment: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/2921983.json?print=pretty
{
"by" : "norvig",
"id" : 2921983,
"kids" : [ 2922097, 2922429, 2924562, 2922709, 2922573, 2922140, 2922141 ],
"parent" : 2921506,
"text" : "Aw shucks, guys ... you make me blush with your compliments.<p>Tell you what, Ill make a deal: I'll keep writing if you keep reading. K?",
"time" : 1314211127,
"type" : "comment"
}poll: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/126809.json?print=pretty
{
"by" : "pg",
"descendants" : 54,
"id" : 126809,
"kids" : [ 126822, 126823, 126993, 126824, 126934, 127411, 126888, 127681, 126818, 126816, 126854, 127095, 126861, 127313, 127299, 126859, 126852, 126882, 126832, 127072, 127217, 126889, 127535, 126917, 126875 ],
"parts" : [ 126810, 126811, 126812 ],
"score" : 46,
"text" : "",
"time" : 1204403652,
"title" : "Poll: What would happen if News.YC had explicit support for polls?",
"type" : "poll"
}and one of its parts: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/160705.json?print=pretty
{
"by" : "pg",
"id" : 160705,
"parent" : 160704,
"score" : 335,
"text" : "Yes, ban them; I'm tired of seeing Valleywag stories on News.YC.",
"time" : 1207886576,
"type" : "pollopt"
}Users are identified by case-sensitive ids, and live under https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| id | The user's unique username. Case-sensitive. Required. |
| delay | Delay in minutes between a comment's creation and its visibility to other users. |
| created | Creation date of the user, in Unix Time. |
| karma | The user's karma. |
| about | The user's optional self-description. HTML. |
| submitted | List of the user's stories, polls and comments. |
For example: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/jl.json?print=pretty
{
"about" : "This is a test",
"created" : 1173923446,
"delay" : 0,
"id" : "jl",
"karma" : 2937,
"submitted" : [ 8265435, 8168423, 8090946, 8090326, 7699907, 7637962, 7596179, 7596163, 7594569, 7562135, 7562111, 7494708, 7494171, 7488093, 7444860, 7327817, 7280290, 7278694, 7097557, 7097546, 7097254, 7052857, 7039484, 6987273, 6649999, 6649706, 6629560, 6609127, 6327951, 6225810, 6111999, 5580079, 5112008, 4907948, 4901821, 4700469, 4678919, 3779193, 3711380, 3701405, 3627981, 3473004, 3473000, 3457006, 3422158, 3136701, 2943046, 2794646, 2482737, 2425640, 2411925, 2408077, 2407992, 2407940, 2278689, 2220295, 2144918, 2144852, 1875323, 1875295, 1857397, 1839737, 1809010, 1788048, 1780681, 1721745, 1676227, 1654023, 1651449, 1641019, 1631985, 1618759, 1522978, 1499641, 1441290, 1440993, 1436440, 1430510, 1430208, 1385525, 1384917, 1370453, 1346118, 1309968, 1305415, 1305037, 1276771, 1270981, 1233287, 1211456, 1210688, 1210682, 1194189, 1193914, 1191653, 1190766, 1190319, 1189925, 1188455, 1188177, 1185884, 1165649, 1164314, 1160048, 1159156, 1158865, 1150900, 1115326, 933897, 924482, 923918, 922804, 922280, 922168, 920332, 919803, 917871, 912867, 910426, 902506, 891171, 807902, 806254, 796618, 786286, 764412, 764325, 642566, 642564, 587821, 575744, 547504, 532055, 521067, 492164, 491979, 383935, 383933, 383930, 383927, 375462, 263479, 258389, 250751, 245140, 243472, 237445, 229393, 226797, 225536, 225483, 225426, 221084, 213940, 213342, 211238, 210099, 210007, 209913, 209908, 209904, 209903, 170904, 165850, 161566, 158388, 158305, 158294, 156235, 151097, 148566, 146948, 136968, 134656, 133455, 129765, 126740, 122101, 122100, 120867, 120492, 115999, 114492, 114304, 111730, 110980, 110451, 108420, 107165, 105150, 104735, 103188, 103187, 99902, 99282, 99122, 98972, 98417, 98416, 98231, 96007, 96005, 95623, 95487, 95475, 95471, 95467, 95326, 95322, 94952, 94681, 94679, 94678, 94420, 94419, 94393, 94149, 94008, 93490, 93489, 92944, 92247, 91713, 90162, 90091, 89844, 89678, 89498, 86953, 86109, 85244, 85195, 85194, 85193, 85192, 84955, 84629, 83902, 82918, 76393, 68677, 61565, 60542, 47745, 47744, 41098, 39153, 38678, 37741, 33469, 12897, 6746, 5252, 4752, 4586, 4289 ]
}The coolest part of Firebase is its support for change notifications. While you can subscribe to individual items and profiles, you'll need to use the following to observe front page ranking, new items, and new profiles.
The current largest item id is at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/maxitem. You can walk backward from here to discover all items.
Example: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/maxitem.json?print=pretty
9130260Up to 500 top and new stories are at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories and https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/newstories.
Example: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty
[ 9129911, 9129199, 9127761, 9128141, 9128264, 9127792, 9129248, 9127092, 9128367, ..., 9038733 ]Up to 200 of the latest Ask HN, Show HN, and Job stories are at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/askstories, https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/showstories, and https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/jobstories.
Example: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/askstories.json?print=pretty
[ 9127232, 9128437, 9130049, 9130144, 9130064, 9130028, 9129409, 9127243, 9128571, ..., 9120990 ]The item and profile changes are at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/updates.
Example: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/updates.json?print=pretty
{
"items" : [ 8423305, 8420805, 8423379, 8422504, 8423178, 8423336, 8422717, 8417484, 8423378, 8423238, 8423353, 8422395, 8423072, 8423044, 8423344, 8423374, 8423015, 8422428, 8423377, 8420444, 8423300, 8422633, 8422599, 8422408, 8422928, 8394339, 8421900, 8420902, 8422087 ],
"profiles" : [ "thefox", "mdda", "plinkplonk", "GBond", "rqebmm", "neom", "arram", "mcmancini", "metachris", "DubiousPusher", "dochtman", "kstrauser", "biren34", "foobarqux", "mkehrt", "nathanm412", "wmblaettler", "JoeAnzalone", "rcconf", "johndbritton", "msie", "cktsai", "27182818284", "kevinskii", "wildwood", "mcherm", "naiyt", "matthewmcg", "joelhaus", "tshtf", "MrZongle2", "Bogdanp" ]
}