Every Hacker News RSS Feed URL, What It Returns, and Where It Stops

What is the Hacker News RSS feed?

The official Hacker News RSS feed lives at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss and returns the stories on the current front page as RSS 2.0, with each item's title, link, date and comments URL and nothing more. Our request on 28 September 2026 came back as application/rss+xml with 30 items, one per front page slot, under a channel described as "Links for the intellectually curious, ranked by readers." Use it to follow the front page in a reader, and use a different feed for anything keyword-based, because this one has no search.

Hacker News does not document the feed. The HN FAQ and the HackerNews/API README never mention RSS. The front page advertises it only in its HTML head, with <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="rss">, which is how feed readers discover it when you paste in the site's address.

Each item carries five elements. <title> and <link> are the story's headline and the article it points to, <pubDate> is the submission time, and <comments> is the discussion URL on news.ycombinator.com. <description> holds a single HTML link labelled "Comments". The feed has no points, no comment count and no author.

Which official Hacker News RSS feeds exist?

Three official feeds returned RSS on 28 September 2026, and the obvious guesses for the rest returned 404. We requested each URL once, a few seconds apart, logged out.

URL	Result	What it contains
news.ycombinator.com/rss	200, 30 items	The front page, in rank order
news.ycombinator.com/bigrss	200, 300 items	A longer ranked list, led by the same stories as /rss, with dates back to 22 September
news.ycombinator.com/showrss	200, 30 items	The Show HN page, which advertises this feed in its own HTML head
news.ycombinator.com/rss?p=2	200, 30 items	The same front page again; the page parameter is ignored
/newestrss, /askrss, /newcommentsrss, /newest.rss	404	Nothing

The gaps are the ones a monitor cares about. No official feed lists new submissions, Ask HN, or comments, and none filters by keyword. The /newest page carries no RSS link in its HTML head, which matches the 404s.

Where the official feed stops

1

Front page feed. /rss returns 30 items and /bigrss returns 300, both in rank order.

2

Guess a URL. /newestrss, /askrss and /newcommentsrss each return 404.

3

Check the HTML head. /newest carries no RSS link there, matching the 404s.

4

Move to hnrss.org. It covers new posts, comments, Ask HN and keyword search that Hacker News itself never serves.

What does hnrss.org add to Hacker News RSS?

hnrss.org fills every gap the official feeds leave, and it is a separate project, not part of Hacker News. Its documentation describes "custom, realtime RSS feeds for Hacker News" and credits Algolia: "Without it, hnrss.org simply would not exist." The page was last updated on 14 December 2022, and the feeds we requested on 28 September 2026 identified themselves as hnrss v2.1.1.

Feed	URL	Returns
New posts	https://hnrss.org/newest	Every new submission
New comments	https://hnrss.org/newcomments	Every new comment
Front page	https://hnrss.org/frontpage	Posts as they reach the front page
Keyword in posts	https://hnrss.org/newest?q=KEYWORD	New posts matching the term, titles only by default
Keyword in comments	https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=KEYWORD	New comments matching the term
Ask HN, Show HN, polls	/ask, /show, /polls	Self-posts of each type
One thread	https://hnrss.org/item?id=THREAD_ID	New comments on that post
Replies to you	https://hnrss.org/replies?id=USERNAME	New replies to that user's comments

Parameters change any feed. points=N and comments=N keep only entries with more than N of each, though the docs note that /newcomments "does not work with a points=N parameter." count=N raises the default of 20 items, with "a hardcoded limit of 100 entries." link=comments points each item at the HN discussion instead of the article, and adding .atom or .jsonfeed to a path switches the format.

The comment feeds carry what the official feed lacks. A /newcomments?q=postgres item on 28 September 2026 held the full comment text in <description>, the author in <dc:creator>, and a title reading "New comment by crote in" followed by the story's headline.

How do you monitor a keyword on Hacker News with RSS?

Subscribe to two hnrss.org feeds per keyword, one for posts and one for comments, because a keyword that appears only in a reply never shows up in the post feed. Feeds are the do-it-yourself route for the Hacker News part of monitoring brand mentions. Set them up in this order.

1. Build the post feed: https://hnrss.org/newest?q=your+keyword. Searches look at titles only unless you add search_attrs=title,url or search_attrs=default.
2. Build the comment feed: https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=your+keyword. A keyword named only in a reply never appears in a title.
3. Combine terms with OR inside one feed, as in q=git+OR+linux, and percent-encode reserved characters, so C++ becomes C%2B%2B. The syntax is narrower than full Boolean search operators, so run separate feeds for terms you want to track apart.
4. Add link=comments so every item opens the discussion, which is where you reply.
5. Add count=100 if your reader polls once a day or less, since 20 items cover little time on a busy term like a programming language.
6. Leave out points= on the comment feed. The docs say it does not work there.

Build in a retry. Our first request to hnrss.org on 28 September 2026 returned HTTP 502 Bad Gateway, and the same feeds returned 200 with 20 items each on retry. hnrss.org publishes no uptime commitment and no rate limit, and its docs ask users of one Algolia-backed feed to "be extra conservative with your refresh schedule."

What does Hacker News RSS miss?

RSS on Hacker News misses dead posts, anything past 100 entries, and every signal about which thread deserves a reply. hnrss.org reads from Algolia's index, and in our 28 September 2026 test Algolia's /api/v1/items/<id> endpoint returned 404 for all 20 dead items we checked, stories and comments alike. A post killed by flags or software before your reader polls never reaches the feed.

Volume is the second limit. A feed holds at most 100 entries, so a reader that polls a broad term once a day loses whatever scrolled past. The third is judgement. An RSS item tells you a keyword appeared, not whether the person is asking for a tool, comparing two, or mentioning the word in passing, so every match costs a click to find out. A short or common keyword also pulls in unrelated uses of the word, the false positive problem that negative keywords exist to cut.

How does Hacker News RSS compare with the Hacker News API?

The official API gives you everything the feeds give you plus the fields they strip out, at the cost of writing code. The Hacker News API page covers both public APIs in full.

Need	Official RSS	hnrss.org	Firebase API	Algolia API
Front page	/rss, 30 items	/frontpage	/v0/topstories.json, at most 500 ids	tags=front_page
New posts	No	/newest	/v0/newstories.json	search_by_date?tags=story
Keyword search	No	q=	No	query=
Comments	No	/newcomments	Per item, through kids	tags=comment
Points and comment counts	No	points=, comments= filters	score, descendants	points, num_comments
Works in a feed reader	Yes	Yes	No	No

RSS wins when you want a reader to do the polling for you. The APIs win when you want counts, full threads or more than 100 results.

How does RedReplier monitor Hacker News without feeds?

RedReplier's Hacker News monitoring watches new submissions, the front page, Show HN and Ask HN posts, plus comments, for the keywords you set, which covers the two feeds per keyword that the RSS setup needs. Matches show up within minutes of a story or comment going live, each one scored by buyer intent so a question asking for a tool rises above a passing mention. Hacker News runs in the same monitor as Reddit, X, Bluesky and Facebook. Matches land on your RedReplier dashboard, and email alerts go out as digests on a cadence you set per keyword, from hourly to daily.

RedReplier drafts a reply for each high-intent thread and never posts it. A human reviews every reply, and on Hacker News you write the final comment in your own words, since HN's guidelines say "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text."

Frequently asked questions

Does Hacker News have an RSS feed?

Yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss returns the 30 front page stories as RSS 2.0, and /showrss returns the Show HN page. Hacker News does not document either feed, but both returned 200 on 28 September 2026 and the site advertises them in its HTML head.

How do I get an RSS feed of new Hacker News posts?

Use https://hnrss.org/newest. Hacker News has no official feed of new submissions: /newestrss and /newest.rss both returned 404 in our test. hnrss.org is a third-party service built on Algolia's API.

Can I get a Hacker News RSS feed for a keyword?

Yes, through hnrss.org. https://hnrss.org/newest?q=KEYWORD returns new posts whose titles match, and https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=KEYWORD returns new comments. Combine terms with OR and percent-encode reserved characters.

How many items does a Hacker News RSS feed return?

The official /rss feed returned 30 items and /bigrss returned 300 on 28 September 2026. hnrss.org feeds return 20 items by default, and count=N raises that to a hardcoded maximum of 100.

Does the Hacker News RSS feed include points and comments?

No. The official feed's items carry only a title, link, date, comments URL and a "Comments" link. hnrss.org filters by points and comment counts with points=N and comments=N, and its comment feeds include the full comment text and author.

Is there an RSS feed for Ask HN?

Not an official one. news.ycombinator.com/askrss returned 404 on 28 September 2026. hnrss.org serves Ask HN posts at https://hnrss.org/ask, and https://hnrss.org/ask?comments=25 keeps only posts with more than 25 comments.

How do you add the Hacker News RSS feed to a reader?

Paste news.ycombinator.com into a feed reader, most readers pick up the RSS link Hacker News advertises in its HTML head and find /rss on their own. The Show HN page works the same way, since it advertises /showrss in its own head.

Why did a request to hnrss.org return a 502 error?

hnrss.org can return a 502 Bad Gateway, our first request to it on 28 September 2026 failed that way before the same feeds returned 200 with 20 items each on retry. The docs publish no uptime commitment, so a monitoring setup needs a retry built in.

Is hnrss.org run by Hacker News?

hnrss.org is a separate project built on Algolia's Hacker News API, not something Hacker News runs itself. Its documentation was last updated on 14 December 2022 and credits Algolia directly: "Without it, hnrss.org simply would not exist."

Can a Hacker News RSS feed come back as Atom instead?

hnrss.org feeds switch format when you add .atom or .jsonfeed to the path, so the same feed that returns RSS can return Atom or JSON Feed instead. The official feeds at news.ycombinator.com only return RSS 2.0, with no alternate format offered.