Hacker News scraper and API skills
Site: news.ycombinator.com
Hacker News is the rare case where the official API is the right answer: the Firebase API is open, unauthenticated, CORS-open and answers in under 100 ms. These skills use it, and fall back to the rendered site only for the views it does not cover.
Working with Hacker News
- Story IDs come from the ordered topstories feed; the visible homepage is not assumed to be the complete set.
- HTML reading is reserved for surfaces the Firebase API does not expose, such as /from and /favorites.
2 Hacker News skills
- news.ycombinator.comv1
Extract Hacker News Top Stories
Retrieve every current Hacker News top story with its title, author, score, and comment count using the official Firebase API.
- news.ycombinator.comv1
Hacker News Get Stories
Fetch Hacker News stories from any list view (front, newest, ask, show, jobs, best, active, classic, by-domain, by-user, historical day) and optionally full comment trees, returning a unified JSON shape.
Hacker News scraping questions
- Does Hacker News have an API?
- Yes — the official Firebase API is open, needs no key, and has no rate limit observed in practice. It is the recommended path.
- Is scraping Hacker News legal?
- Reading data that Hacker News publishes publicly is generally treated as lawful in the US — hiQ v. LinkedIn found that scraping a public site does not by itself violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That is not the whole question: Hacker News's terms of service, its robots.txt, the rate at which you request pages, and any personal or copyrighted data you collect all carry their own obligations, and the rules differ outside the US. These skills read public pages at human-scale rates and never bypass a login. Treat this as background, not legal advice.
- What data can I extract from Hacker News?
- Story ID, title, author, score, comment count and rank, with the Hacker News item URL for each entry.