Introduction

A command line for Hacker News.

hn is a single binary. It reads Hacker News over plain HTTPS, shapes the responses into clean records, and gets out of your way. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to run alongside it.

The two APIs

Hacker News exposes two open, key-free APIs, and hn uses both:

• The official Firebase endpoint (hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0) for live data: the story lists, single items and their comment trees, user profiles, the maximum item id, and the recent-changes feed.
• The Algolia endpoint (hn.algolia.com/api/v1) for full-text search across stories and comments, with filters Firebase does not offer (by tag, by date, by points, by comment count).

You never choose between them. Each command talks to whichever API serves it.

How it is built

• A library package (hackernews) holds the HTTP client and the typed data models. It paces requests, sets an honest User-Agent, retries the transient 429 and 5xx responses any public site throws under load, and fetches story lists and comment trees concurrently.
• A command tree (cli) wraps the library in subcommands that all share the same output formats and flags.
• One cmd/hn entry point ties them together.

Scope

hn is a read-only client. It reads what Hacker News already serves publicly and shapes it for you. There is no login, no voting, and no commenting: the write surface needs a session and is out of scope. That narrow focus keeps hn a single small binary with no database, no daemon, and no setup.

Next: install it, then take the quick start.