Hacker News Has a Free Firebase API — Track What Developers Are Talking About

The Problem Every developer wants to know what's trending in tech. Twitter/X is noisy. Reddit requires auth. Google Trends is vague. But Hacker News has a completely free, unauthenticated Firebase API that gives you real-time access to every story, comment, and user profile. No API key. No rate limits. No signup. The API Base URL: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/ Endpoints Endpoint Returns /topstories.json Top 500 story IDs /newstories.json Newest 500 story IDs /beststories.json Best 500 story IDs /askstories.json Latest Ask HN /showstories.json Latest Show HN /jobstories.json Latest job posts /item/{id}.json Any item (story/comment) /user/{id}.json User profile Real Example: Trending Topics Monitor import requests from collections import Counter # Get top 50 stories top_ids = requests . get ( " https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json " ). json ()[: 50 ] words = [] for sid in top_ids : story = requests . get ( f " https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/ { sid }