Hacker News API — stories, items & search (no key)

Hacker News as a clean HTTP API (and MCP tool): get the top/new/best/Ask/Show/Jobs story lists resolved to full items (title, URL, score, author, comments), fetch a single item by id, or run full-text search (by relevance or date). Ideal for tech-news monitoring, dashboards, newsletters and agents. No API key. Pay per query.

• 🔝 Stories — top / new / best / Ask HN / Show HN / Jobs, each item fully resolved (no extra calls).
• 🔎 Search — full-text across stories/comments, sorted by relevance or newest-first.
• 📄 Item — any story or comment by id, with clean text (no HTML).
• 🔗 Every result includes the HN discussion link.
• 💵 Pay per query · no key.

The use case it was built for

Track what the tech world is talking about: feed an agent the current top stories, search for mentions of your product or a topic, or build a "trending on HN" panel. Clean, typed rows — no scraping.

Sample output (stories, top)

{
  "ok": true, "type": "top", "count": 20,
  "stories": [
    { "id": 49753878, "type": "story", "title": "…", "url": "https://…", "by": "…",
      "score": 342, "time": "2026-09-18T12:00:00.000Z", "comments": 128,
      "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753878" }
  ]
}

How to use

• HTTP API (Standby): POST or GET /stories, /item, /search. GET / returns help. Example: GET /search?q=rust&byDate=true.
• Normal run: pass { operation, ... }; results land in the dataset + key-value store.
• MCP tool: expose it to your agent via Apify's MCP server.

Input

• operation — stories · item · search.
• type — (stories) top/new/best/ask/show/job. id — (item) HN id.
• q / byDate / tags — (search) text, newest-first, and what to search. limit — cap results.

Pricing

Per query from $0.004 (down to $0.0015 on higher tiers). One call = one query (a stories call resolves many items in one query).

Related Actors

• Wikipedia API — encyclopedic context to pair with the news.

FAQ

Do I need a key? No — HN's Firebase and Algolia APIs are keyless.

How fresh? Real-time; stories and search reflect current HN state.

Comments? Search with tags=comment, or fetch a comment by item id.

Notes & limits

Data from Hacker News (hacker-news.firebaseio.com + hn.algolia.com). Up to 50 items per call.