Hacker News search API

Search Hacker News stories or comments (Algolia HN API), by relevance or recency, with points and comment counts. For research/trend agents. Answers 'top HN discussion about X', 'what is HN saying about Y', 'recent HN posts on Z', 'trending on Hacker News'.

Price$0.01per request

MethodPOST

Route/v1/dev/hn-search

StatusLive

MIME typeapplication/json

Rate limit60/minute

Cache300s public

devhacker-newshnsearchtech-newstrendsdiscussionresearch

API URLhttps://x402.hexl.dev/v1/dev/hn-search

Integration docs

Example request

{
  "query": "agentic payments",
  "sort": "relevance",
  "limit": 1
}

Example response

{
  "query": "agentic payments",
  "type": "story",
  "total": 42,
  "results": [
    {
      "title": "Agents are paying each other with x402",
      "url": "https://example.com",
      "author": "pg",
      "points": 240,
      "comments": 88,
      "createdAt": "2026-05-01T00:00:00Z",
      "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123"
    }
  ]
}

Input schema

{
  "type": "object",
  "required": [
    "query"
  ],
  "properties": {
    "query": {
      "type": "string",
      "examples": [
        "x402 payments"
      ]
    },
    "type": {
      "type": "string",
      "enum": [
        "story",
        "comment"
      ],
      "default": "story"
    },
    "sort": {
      "type": "string",
      "enum": [
        "relevance",
        "recent"
      ],
      "default": "relevance"
    },
    "limit": {
      "type": "number",
      "default": 10
    }
  }
}

Output schema

{
  "type": "object",
  "additionalProperties": true
}