# HackerNews/API

Documentation and Samples for the Official HN API

Repository: https://github.com/HackerNews/API
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/api
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2025-01-01T07:55:30+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 32/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4353, "days_push": 609, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 13276, forks 759 (observed 2026-08-28T04:11:03.007356+00:00)

## What it is
Official documentation and samples for the Hacker News public API, hosted on Firebase. It describes how to access HN items (stories, comments, jobs, polls) and user data as JSON over versioned URIs.

## Use cases
- fetch hacker news stories and comments programmatically
- build a hacker news client app
- track new posts on hacker news in real time
- get comment threads for a hacker news article
- retrieve user profiles and submissions from hacker news

## When to choose
- you want official, near-real-time access to Hacker News data
- you can use Firebase client libraries for efficient event-driven updates
- you need free API access with no rate limit

## When to avoid
- you need a convenient high-level API - the v0 API is a raw dump of in-memory structures requiring manual tree traversal
- you need backward-compatible guarantees across versions
- you want filtering or querying features - only basic item/user endpoints exist

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: stable
- function: http-client, json, web-scraping
- domain: apis, developer-tools, social-media
- platform: cross-platform
- tags: hacker-news, firebase, public-api, documentation, rest-api, web-server, android, ios

## Member repositories
- HackerNews/API (main) score 32

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:11:03.007356+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T07:21:05.066613+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/HackerNews/API (fetched 2026-08-28T04:11:03.007356+00:00, sha b18a63ba29db)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.