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. |
Each feed is valid RSS served over HTTPS.
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.
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
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
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.
Ask HN, Show HN, and polls are available:
https://hnrss.org/ask https://hnrss.org/show https://hnrss.org/polls
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 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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
You can disable the <description> element entirely by passing the description=0 parameter:
https://hnrss.org/newest?description=0
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.
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!
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.
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.