Hacker News API

Hacker News API for stories and search

Two endpoints over the public hn.algolia.com index — search stories by term, and read one story by id. No key, no account, and no residential proxy: it is the first platform here with an official direct path and nothing to configure.

Get a free key — 1,000 credits a month, no card

or get a key with just your email

One call. Real response.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $HH_KEY" \
  "https://honesthook.com/api/v1/hackernews/search?q=rust&limit=25"

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "hackernews",
  "endpoint": "hackernews/search",
  "data": {
    "author": {
      "id": null,
      "handle": null,
      "followers": null
    },
    "items": [
      {
        "id": "46990729",
        "title": "An AI agent published a hit piece on me",
        "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729",
        "published_at": "2026-09-28T11:04:22.000Z",
        "metrics": { "points": 412, "comments": 176 },
        "position": 1
      }
    ],
    "has_more": null
  },
  "error": null,
  "cached": false
}

Recorded response, captured 30 Sep 2026. A live call returns the value at the moment you ask. The same envelope comes back from every other platform — only platform and endpoint change.

What this endpoint does not return.

No author. The Algolia response carries `author` on every hit and it is dropped on the way out — the same decision the archiver has carried since 2026-09-06. This product measures what was posted, not who posted it.
No comment threads. `story` returns the story and the comment COUNT, never the comment texts: one measured item carried 176 comments, each with an author and a body from someone who did not ask to be republished.
No profile endpoint, and it is not an oversight. There is no `hackernews/profile` for the same reason there is no author field.
No follower counts. Hacker News has no follow graph, so every author field is null rather than zero.

A field we cannot read comes back null, never 0. A zero would be a claim about the account; null is a fact about our collection.

The part you are handing over.

The index is Algolia's and the shape has been stable since it was first read in 2026-09-05. What you are handing over is the part that took a day to learn: that the index does not understand OR, and that with typo tolerance left on, a search for `mrr` returns 81 results and none of them about MRR.

Pricing

1,000 credits a month, free, renewing — no card. After that, US$ 9 per month for 5,000 credits. A profile call costs 1 credit, and a call that finds nothing costs nothing.

The free tier needs no account — the form at the top of this page is all of it. Signing in is for paying, and for seeing what a key has left. Paid plans renew until cancelled and a charge can be refunded in full within 7 days: terms · privacy.