HackerNews API

Overview

Measurement Record

What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.

Request

GET https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty

Result

HTTP 200 · application/json · 5,003 bytes

Response time

166 ms (median of 3) · fastest 161 ms

Transport

TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 · certificate issued by Google Trust Services

Browser CORS

Allowed — Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://apisscore.com

Served by

nginx

Recorded

2026-08-10

Available Data

The kind of data this API exposes, based on its documentation. We could not call the endpoint to confirm the exact field names.

Captured Response

Captured from a real request to https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.

[
  49241679
]

Implementation Example

Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.

const url = "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty";
const response = await fetch(url);
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);

import requests

url = "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty"
headers = {}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=30)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
print(data)

curl 'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty'

What Can You Build?

// Get social media user data
const response = await fetch(`https://github.com/HackerNews/API`);
const data = await response.json();
const user = data.user || data.data || data;
console.log('Username:', user.username || user.name || user.login);
console.log('Followers:', user.followers || user.followers_count || 'N/A');

// Fetch trending social content
const response = await fetch(`https://github.com/HackerNews/API`);
const data = await response.json();
const posts = data.posts || data.data || data.results || [];
const items = Array.isArray(posts) ? posts : [posts];
items.slice(0, 5).forEach(post => {
  console.log(`📱 ${post.title || post.text || post.content || JSON.stringify(post)}`);
});

// Aggregate social media content
const response = await fetch(`https://github.com/HackerNews/API`);
const data = await response.json();
const feed = data.feed || data.posts || data.data || [];
const container = document.getElementById('social-feed');
const items = Array.isArray(feed) ? feed : [feed];
items.slice(0, 10).forEach(item => {
  const el = document.createElement('div');
  el.textContent = item.text || item.content || JSON.stringify(item);
  container.appendChild(el);
});

Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.

How This API Fails

We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.

Common Errors & Troubleshooting

Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.