Hacker News

Hacker News is a small platform with an outsized signal-to-noise ratio for anything developer-adjacent: launches, outages, hiring, and the unfiltered opinion underneath them. Four endpoints cover it — keyword search over the whole archive, one story, its complete comment tree, and a user profile. All four are 1 credit.

Base URL: /v1/hackernews/...

Getting started

Every endpoint is a GET with query parameters and an x-api-key header. Stories are identified by their numeric id, which search returns as the objectID.

# 1. Find the discussion
curl "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/hackernews/search?query=claude%20code&tags=story" \
  -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY"

# 2. Read the thread underneath it
curl "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/hackernews/story/comments?id=$STORY_ID" \
  -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY"

Search

GET /v1/hackernews/search?query=… runs against the Algolia index behind HN's own search, and it exposes Algolia's filters directly.

tags is the important one. It defaults to story, and the useful values are comment, poll, show_hn, ask_hn, front_page, and author_<username> for one person's submissions. Pass several comma-separated to widen the search — tags=story,show_hn — and pass comment when you want to search what people said rather than what they posted.

numericFilters takes an Algolia expression on created_at_i, the Unix timestamp, which is the only filterable numeric attribute: numericFilters=created_at_i>1700000000 restricts to stories after that moment, and several conditions joined by commas are ANDed. No filter is applied by default.

hitsPerPage runs from 1 to 1000 and defaults to 30, and page is 0-indexed here — unlike most page-paginated endpoints on this API, which start at 1.

# Show HN launches mentioning "agent", 100 at a time
curl "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/hackernews/search?query=agent&tags=show_hn&hitsPerPage=100&page=0" \
  -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY"

Stories, comments and people

story returns one submission by id — title, link, author, points, comment count and publish time. story/comments returns the whole discussion as a nested tree, each comment carrying its id, author, text, points, time and its own replies. There is no pagination and no depth limit: one call returns the thread.

/v1/hackernews/profile returns a user by handle — id, username, bio, karma and account creation date. HN handles are case-sensitive. The site has no follower counts and no post counts, so those canonical fields come back empty rather than zero.

Endpoints

4 endpoints available.

Read this before you build

page starts at 0. Search is the exception to the house convention. Sending page=1 skips the first results rather than returning them.

Points and comment counts are snapshots. HN scores move for hours after posting. If you are tracking a launch, re-fetch rather than trusting a first read.

Hacker News is also a /v1/search/everywhere source. If your question is "who is talking about this anywhere", the universal search covers HN alongside Reddit, X, YouTube and the rest in one call. Come here when you need the full comment tree or Algolia's filters.

Notes

• All endpoints use GET with query parameters
• Authentication via the x-api-key header
• Responses follow the unified SocialCrawl schema
• All four endpoints are 1 credit
• The story id is the objectID on a search hit, and the number in a news.ycombinator.com/item?id=… URL