Hacker News story score & comments from a URL — free API, no key

Hacker News API

Get a Hacker News story's score and comment count from its URL

Hand Pulse a news.ycombinator.com/item?id=… URL and get the story's points, comment count, author, title, and submission date back as clean JSON — one GET request, no key, no signup. The same call shape works for Stack Overflow questions and every other platform Pulse supports, so you write one integration instead of one per site.

One request

curl "https://pulse.walls.sh/metrics?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D8863"

returns:

{
  "platform": "hackernews",
  "title": "My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive",
  "author": "@dhouston",
  "likes": 110,        // points (upvotes)
  "comments": 71,
  "views": null,       // HN doesn't expose view counts
  "publishedAt": "2007-04-05T19:14:21.000Z"
}

Pulse normalizes every platform to the same fields, so a Hacker News story's points land in likes — the closest cross-platform equivalent — and the thread's reply count lands in comments. views is null because Hacker News genuinely doesn't publish one; Pulse reports what's real and never invents a number.

Why not just call the official Firebase API?

You can — Hacker News publishes a free, official Firebase API, and Pulse uses it under the hood for HN. The point of Pulse isn't to replace it; it's that the same request returns the same normalized shape for Stack Overflow, YouTube, X, TikTok, Bluesky, Mastodon, and more. If you're tracking "how is this link doing" across the places it was shared, you call one endpoint instead of learning six different response formats.

Stack Overflow too — same call

curl "https://pulse.walls.sh/metrics?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstackoverflow.com%2Fquestions%2F11227809%2Fwhy-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array"

A Stack Overflow question returns its real view count and score:

{
  "platform": "stackoverflow",
  "title": "Why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an unsorted array?",
  "views": 1987340,
  "likes": 27537,      // question score
  "comments": 26
}

Those are live numbers from that question's public page, fetched at request time.

Track a story's climb

Hit /history with the same URL and Pulse records a timestamped series, so you can watch a submission's points and comments rise through the day:

curl "https://pulse.walls.sh/history?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D8863"

See tracking a post's growth curve for the full pattern, or drop a live badge in your README.

Free

No signup, no key. For commercial use or volume, Pro is $19/mo — see pricing. Full API docs.

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