
Hacker News Has Two Secret APIs — Firebase + Algolia Search
Hacker News doesn't have an obvious API button on its website. But it has two powerful APIs running behind the scenes. API 1: Firebase (Real-Time) HN's data is stored in Firebase. Every story, comment, and user profile is accessible: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json # Top 500 story IDs https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/12345.json # Any item by ID https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/pg.json # Any user profile No authentication. Real-time updates. Returns clean JSON. API 2: Algolia (Full-Text Search) HN has a search API powered by Algolia — full-text search across all stories and comments: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=web+scraping&tags=story https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=MCP+server&numericFilters=points>10 Filter by: story/comment type, points, date range, author. Sort by relevance or date. What This Data Tells You Technology trends. What gets upvoted on HN today becomes mainstream in 6-12 months. Track points over t
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