Hacker News API. Search every thread.

Yes. Social Fetch provides search, ranked feeds, story and polymorphic item lookup, comment-tree paging, comment ancestor context, user profile plus submissions/comments/favorites, Who is Hiring parsing, and updates/maxitem freshness polls under /v1/hackernews. Authenticate with a Social Fetch API key in the x-api-key header.

HN's Firebase API (hacker-news.firebaseio.com) is free and public with no key required, and it is a fine choice for a single item or the max-item id. It has no full-text search, no ranked-feed hydration beyond raw id arrays, and no built-in comment-tree traversal — you write the recursive kids walk yourself. Social Fetch adds search, feed hydration, cursor-paged comment trees, and comment-to-root ancestor context under one envelope alongside other platforms.

Call GET /v1/hackernews/stories/{id}/comments with the story id. It returns a flat comments list (each with parentId/childIds), rootCommentIds, a page block for continuation, and traversal telemetry. When page.hasMore is true, pass page.nextCursor as the cursor query param to keep paging. This route charges 3 credits per page — more than a plain item lookup — because it walks the tree server-side so you don't have to.

Call GET /v1/hackernews/comments/{id}/context with the comment id. On lookupStatus: found you get data.comment, an ancestors chain toward the root, and the root data.story when available. This is the route for expanding a bare comment URL into title, thread, and reply context — it charges 2 credits per request.

Yes for public favorites via GET /v1/hackernews/users/{username}/favorites. Private or unavailable favorites return lookupStatus: private_or_unavailable with an empty items list rather than a fake empty found page. Upvoted pages are not supported.

Yes. GET /v1/hackernews/jobs/who-is-hiring discovers the current monthly Ask HN thread and returns top-level comments as rows with commentId, author, createdAt, the full plain-text text, and best-effort company, role, location, remote, salary, visa, and contact fields. Structured fields can be null even when the posting mentions them in prose — text is always the source of truth.

GET /v1/hackernews/feeds/jobs returns the ranked feed of standalone HN job-type items. GET /v1/hackernews/jobs/who-is-hiring parses the monthly Ask HN thread's comments into job rows instead. GET /v1/hackernews/search with type=job is keyword discovery across job postings. Pick the route that matches the corpus you actually want.

You buy credit packs (or use the 100 free signup credits). Most routes — search, feeds, stories, items, user profile, submissions, comments, favorites, updates, maxitem, and Who is Hiring — cost 1 credit per successful request or page. Story comment paging costs 3 credits per page and comment context costs 2 credits per request. Always check meta.creditsCharged on the response.

No. HTTP 200 means the request finished. Check data.lookupStatus where the route exposes it — found, not_found, not_story, not_comment, or private_or_unavailable (favorites only). Persist meta.requestId when you need to debug a miss.

Use GET /v1/hackernews/maxitem for the current high-water maxItemId to catch brand-new ids, and GET /v1/hackernews/updates for changedItemIds/changedUsernames to catch edits to existing items and profiles. Neither returns full bodies — hydrate the ids you care about with /items/{id}, /stories/{id}, or /users/{username} after filtering.

Social Fetch returns publicly visible HN data via HN's own public APIs and the public favorites page. You are responsible for how you use it under Y Combinator's terms, applicable law, and your own compliance review. We do not give legal advice.