--- title: Hacker News now has an API. It's Firebase | daily.dev description: Y Combinator launched a public API for Hacker News built on Firebase, giving developers realtime access to HN data through Firebase's Web, iOS, Android, and... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/hacker-news-now-has-an-api-it-s-firebase-85nxa1ueo twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Hacker News now has an API. It's Firebase | daily.dev og:description: Y Combinator launched a public API for Hacker News built on Firebase, giving developers realtime access to HN data through Firebase's Web, iOS, Android, and... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/hacker-news-now-has-an-api-it-s-firebase-85nxa1ueo og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/85nxA1UEo.png og:image:alt: Hacker News now has an API. It's Firebase og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Hacker News now has an API. It's Firebase **[Firebase](https://daily.dev/sources/firebase-blog)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Y Combinator launched a public API for Hacker News built on Firebase, giving developers realtime access to HN data through Firebase's Web, iOS, Android, and REST SDKs. The post includes code samples in JavaScript, Objective-C, and Java showing how to fetch the top story and listen for realtime updates, and links to full documentation hosted on Firebase. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How do I get the top story from the Hacker News API using Firebase? Connect to the Firebase reference at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/, then read the child path 'topstories' at index 0 to get the top story's item ID, and use that ID to fetch details from the 'item' child path. Attaching a 'value' event listener on these paths gives realtime updates whenever the top story or its score changes. _Developers building HN-powered apps can track API and platform changes like this on daily.dev._ ### Does Hacker News have an official API? Yes, Y Combinator launched an official Hacker News API in 2014 built on top of Firebase, giving developers realtime access to HN data through Firebase's Web, iOS, Android, and REST SDKs instead of having to scrape the site. Full documentation is hosted at hacker-news.firebaseapp.com. _Anyone integrating third-party data sources can follow API launches like this via daily.dev._ --- Tags: [#javascript](https://daily.dev/tags/javascript), [#infrastructure](https://daily.dev/tags/infrastructure), [#architecture](https://daily.dev/tags/architecture), [#firebase](https://daily.dev/tags/firebase) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/hacker-news-now-has-an-api-it-s-firebase-85nxa1ueo) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Hacker News now has an API. 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