hackernews-api/story

Hacker News story API — one story by id, without the comments

One story by its numeric id. Returns the story and the comment count, never the comment texts.

Parameters

Name	What it is
`id`	The Hacker News item id. Digits only.

Handle format and anchor

Handle: id (digits, up to 12)
Anchor: id + title

Fields returned

id
title
url
published_at
metrics.points
metrics.comments

What this endpoint does not return.

childrenThe comment tree is discarded. Each of those 176 comments carries an author and a body from a person who is not the caller and did not ask for this. The count survives because a count measures without identifying.
authorSame decision as every other surface here.
comments on a comment idAn id that belongs to a comment rather than a story is a 404. Upstream answers 200 for both, with title null on the comment — without that anchor the caller would get somebody's comment text in a field labelled story, with success true.

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.

Measured

Measured on item 46990729 on 2026-09-30: the upstream response is 489,835 bytes and carries 176 comments. What this endpoint returns is one item, and 176 as a number.

Cost

1 credit per call. A call that finds nothing costs nothing.

Why is metrics.comments sometimes null instead of 0?

Because this upstream endpoint has no num_comments field — the count is derived from the children array. When that array does not come, we do not know the number, and null says so.

Other routes for this platform

hackernews-api/search

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