Hacker News RSS

Overview

hnrss.org provides custom, realtime RSS feeds for Hacker News.

The following feed types are available:

Firehose New posts and comments as they arrive.
Searches New posts and comments matching a given search term.
Replies New comments in reply to a particular user or comment.
Best Comments The best comments from across Hacker News.
Points New posts with more than N points.
Activity New posts with more than N comments.
Front Page New posts as they appear on the front page.
Self-posts New “Ask HN” and “Show HN” posts, along with polls.
Alternative Follow Hacker News through some alternative homepages.
Jobs New hiring posts made by YC startups along with comments from the monthly “Who is hiring?” threads.
Users New posts and comments made by a given user.
Favorites New posts that have been favorited by a particular user
Threads New comments made in a given thread, optionally filtered by username.
Formats In addition to RSS, all of the above are also available in Atom and JSON Feed formats.

Feeds

Each feed is valid RSS served over HTTPS.

Firehose Feeds

The “firehose” feeds contain all new posts and comments as they appear on Hacker News:

https://hnrss.org/newest
https://hnrss.org/newcomments

For just the posts that have appeared on the front page:

https://hnrss.org/frontpage

If the firehose feeds are a bit too noisy for you, read below on filtering them with the points and/or comments parameters.

Search Feeds

You can get a feed of new posts and/or comments containing keywords by using the q=KEYWORD parameter. For example:

https://hnrss.org/newest?q=Django
https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=WordPress

If you want a single search feed but multiple keywords, separate the keywords with " OR ":

https://hnrss.org/newest?q=git+OR+linux

If your query contains reserved characters (especially the plus sign), you'll need to percent-encode those characters:

# This is the percent-encoded form of C++
https://hnrss.org/newest?q=C%2B%2B

Reply Feeds

Keep an eye on replies to your comments:

https://hnrss.org/replies?id=jerf

Use a comment ID to follow replies to a particular comment:

https://hnrss.org/replies?id=17752464

Best Comments

Recent, highly voted comments from across Hacker News:

https://hnrss.org/bestcomments

Some great stuff in here in threads you may not normally have opened. Definitely recommended.

Self Post Feeds

Ask HN, Show HN, and polls are available:

https://hnrss.org/ask
https://hnrss.org/show
https://hnrss.org/polls

Alternative Feeds

Hacker News Classic only counts votes from "early users" (accounts created before February 13, 2008):

https://hnrss.org/classic

Hacker News Best for top vote getters from the past few days:

https://hnrss.org/best

Hacker News Invited and Pool for reposted stories invited back by the mods and given a second chance:

https://hnrss.org/invited
https://hnrss.org/pool

Hacker News Active for posts with the most active, ongoing discussions:

https://hnrss.org/active

Hacker News Launches for "Launch HN" posts from YC affiliated startups:

https://hnrss.org/launches

Job Feeds

Job opportunities from YC funded startups:

https://hnrss.org/jobs

Top level comments in threads created by the whoishiring bot:

# Comments from "Who is hiring?" threads
https://hnrss.org/whoishiring/jobs

# Comments from "Who wants to be hired?" threads
https://hnrss.org/whoishiring/hired

# Comments from "Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?" threads
https://hnrss.org/whoishiring/freelance

# All of the above
https://hnrss.org/whoishiring

If you’re interested in something in particular, you can apply a q=KEYWORD parameter to only return relevant comments. For example, filter the top-level “Who is hiring?” comments to only those containing “React Native”:

https://hnrss.org/whoishiring/jobs?q=React+Native

User Feeds

If you don’t want to miss a post or comment by a given user, you can subscribe to that user’s feed:

https://hnrss.org/submitted?id=USERNAME # posts
https://hnrss.org/threads?id=USERNAME   # comments
https://hnrss.org/user?id=USERNAME      # everything

Favorite Feeds

Supply a username and get a feed of posts that have been "favorited" by that user:

https://hnrss.org/favorites?id=edavis

At the moment this only returns posts, not comments.

Note: This scrapes Hacker News first and then fetches from Algolia. For this reason, please be extra conservative with your refresh schedule. Thanks in advance.

Thread Feeds

A chronological feed of new comments on a particular post can be found at:

https://hnrss.org/item?id=THREAD_ID

You can filter this feed by author by providing the author parameter:

https://hnrss.org/item?id=THREAD_ID&author=USERNAME

With THREAD_ID the numerical ID found in the URL when viewing the comments page and USERNAME being the author's username.

Feed Options

You can modify any feed’s output using URL parameters. Multiple parameters can be applied at the same time by joining them with an ampersand.

Activity Parameters

You can apply a points=N or comments=N parameter to any feed to filter the results so only entries with more than N points or comments are shown:

https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100
https://hnrss.org/ask?comments=25

You can also combine both parameters:

https://hnrss.org/show?points=100&comments=25

Unfortunately, /newcomments does not work with a points=N parameter.

Search Parameter

By default, searches on posts only look at titles. If you want to search against the submitted URLs themselves, use the search_attrs parameter.

Here are some examples:

# Search for posts with "WordPress" in the title only
https://hnrss.org/newest?q=WordPress

# Search for posts with 'WordPress' in the URL only
https://hnrss.org/newest?q=WordPress&search_attrs=url

# Search for posts with 'WordPress' in the title or URL
https://hnrss.org/newest?q=WordPress&search_attrs=title,url

# Don't restrict search attributes at all. This searches for posts
# containing 'WordPress' in all attributes indexed by Algolia. This was
# the behavior of searches prior to June 3, 2015
https://hnrss.org/newest?q=WordPress&search_attrs=default

By default, the RSS <link> element points to the submitted article’s URL. The <link> element can be changed to point to the Hacker News comment page by appending link=comments to the end of the URL. For example:

https://hnrss.org/newest?link=comments

Description Parameter

You can disable the <description> element entirely by passing the description=0 parameter:

https://hnrss.org/newest?description=0

Count Parameter

By default, feeds return 20 RSS items. This can be increased via the count=N parameter:

https://hnrss.org/newest?count=50

There is a hardcoded limit of 100 entries, so keep that in mind.

Feed Formats

By default, feeds come back as RSS. But if you add “.atom” or “.jsonfeed” to any endpoint you’ll receive the contents in Atom or JSON Feed, respectively.

# The front page as Atom
https://hnrss.org/frontpage.atom

# "Ask HN" with 10 or more comments as JSON Feed
https://hnrss.org/ask.jsonfeed?comments=10

Note: These formats are a lot less battle-tested than the RSS format. If you see any wonkiness or they don’t play nicely with your feed reader, please open an issue with as much information as possible. Thanks!

Credits

Thanks to Algolia for providing their REST API. Without it, hnrss.org simply would not exist.

Thanks to Jared Andrews for the PR that created the /whoishiring/ endpoints.

Thanks to Zhiming Wang for adding Python 3 support.

Thanks to Grant Jenks for the idea of adding the Article URL and Points to the description.

Thanks to Chuck Grimmett for being a sounding board when it comes to adding new features to hnrss.org as well as suggesting the /jobs endpoint.

And many, many thanks to all those who have donated in support of the project over the years. You all mean the world to me.

Colophon

hnrss.org is powered by the Gin web framework, served by nginx, and hosted on DigitalOcean. HTTPS is provided by Let’s Encrypt. DNS is provided by Namecheap.

This documentation was last updated on December 14, 2022.