Hacker News on any website.

Hacker News occupies an extraordinary position in the 2026 social-platform landscape. Reddit went paid in July 2023, charging $0.24 per 1000 calls above a 10K monthly threshold, which killed Apollo, RIF, Sync and most third-party Reddit apps. X moved to paid API tiers in February 2023, gating any meaningful read access behind plans starting at $100 a month. Meta deprecated the Instagram Basic Display API on December 4, 2024. Even smaller platforms like Twitch and TikTok have tightened access. Hacker News did the opposite. The HN team launched a public Firebase Realtime Database in October 2014, in collaboration with the Firebase team (then a YC company), and committed to keeping it open. The API lives at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/ and exposes endpoints like /topstories.json (the 500 most recent top stories), /newstories.json, /beststories.json, /showstories.json, /askstories.json, /jobstories.json, /maxitem.json, /updates.json, /item/{id}.json (a single story or comment with its full payload) and /user/{username}.json (a profile with karma and submission list). Every endpoint is free, requires no authentication, no API key, no developer registration, no OAuth, and has no advertised rate limit beyond Y Combinator's standard fair-use expectation. The Poper widget reads these endpoints directly through a global edge cache and serves the resulting feeds to your site. While every other social embed tool in our category battles paid-API quotas, OAuth refresh storms and platform-specific terms-of-service changes, the Hacker News widget benefits from the most stable, most permissive data layer in the category. Y Combinator has shown no sign of changing that posture. The dataset is a public good and dang has been clear over the years that keeping it free for non-bulk use is a deliberate community-first choice.

Show HN is Hacker News's purpose-built launch surface. The convention started informally in the early HN days under Paul Graham, was formalized in 2012, and has hosted the public debuts of GitHub Copilot demos, Notion forks, Tailwind CSS, Stripe primitives, Vercel projects, Supabase, Linear early-access posts, Figma plugins, dozens of YC W and S batch companies, and countless indie maker side projects. The format is simple: prefix your post with 'Show HN: ' and post a link to something you built that people can use. The community then either upvotes it onto the front page or politely roasts it in the comments, both of which are valuable. For founders and indie hackers, a Show HN that breaks 100 points is a meaningful signal; one that breaks 500 is launch-critical. The standard play in 2026 is to embed your Show HN thread on the product homepage with a live points counter, comment count and the top three comments visible. This works for two reasons. First, devs and founders check HN before signing up for any new dev tool, so showing real HN traction on-site removes a friction step. Second, the live thread keeps generating social proof for months after the launch falls off Hot. Static screenshots go stale within a week. The Poper widget filtered to Show HN with a minimum-points threshold also doubles as an indie hacker shipping track record: every launch you have ever posted that cleared a quality bar, displayed in chronological order on a /launches or /portfolio page. Six Show HNs over five years reads as a serious builder. Combine that with a sister Reddit feed widget pointed at r/SideProject for cross-community proof.

Ask HN is Hacker News's question-and-discussion format. It serves a similar role to Reddit's AMAs, Stack Exchange's threads and Quora's questions, but with the unique HN community dynamic. Ask HNs about job-hunting, freelancing, career transitions, technical decisions, founder lessons, mental health and esoteric tooling regularly accumulate hundreds of substantive comments and stay relevant for years. Famous examples include the perennial 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?' thread that runs on the first business day of every month and has been a primary recruiting channel for tech startups since 2011, the annual 'Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?' counterpart, and the 'Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?' monthly thread. For founders and tech writers, two Ask HN patterns matter. First, posting your own Ask HN as user research. Frame a sharp question (not a thinly veiled product pitch, which dang and the community will flag fast) and the responses are typically the highest-signal qualitative data a founder gets that quarter. Embed the resulting thread on a research-and-roadmap page on your site so the discussion stays accessible. Second, archiving someone else's relevant Ask HN. If a thread captured a definitive community discussion about a problem your product solves, embedding it on a resource page positions your product in the right adjacency without any fabricated quotes. The Poper widget pointed at a single Ask HN item ID renders the full thread with nested comments, preserves the original points and timestamp, and refreshes once on load to catch any late edits. This works equally well for one-off Ask HNs and for the recurring monthly threads.

In late 2023, Google launched the Discussions and forums search feature and the Forum filter, both of which surface threads from Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Exchange and similar discussion sites prominently. Hacker News threads now appear regularly in commercial-intent and technical-decision queries on Google, often outranking the brands the threads discuss. The technical mechanism is Schema.org's DiscussionForumPosting markup, which Google specifically rewards with rich-result eligibility. The Poper Hacker News Feed Widget emits DiscussionForumPosting JSON-LD for every story it renders, with author (the HN username), datePublished (the story timestamp converted to ISO 8601), upvoteCount (HN points), commentCount (descendants from the Firebase payload), articleBody (the title plus URL or the self-text for Show HN and Ask HN posts) and a sameAs link back to the canonical news.ycombinator.com/item URL. The result is that your embedded HN block is eligible for the same Discussions rich-result treatment as Hacker News itself, which is meaningful for product-comparison pages, dev-tool landing pages, indie maker portfolios and tech blog archives. The only widget catch is that Google requires the embedded content to clearly attribute Hacker News as the source. The Poper widget does that by default with a 'via Hacker News' link in each thread footer pointing to the canonical item URL. Disabling that attribution voids both the schema spec and HN's content policy, so it is not a configurable option.

Hacker News is one of four major discussion-forum surfaces that matter for embedded social proof in 2026: HN, Reddit, Lemmy and the federated Mastodon network. They serve overlapping but distinct audiences. HN is dev, founder, investor and engineer heavy, with strong overlap into the YC ecosystem. Reddit is broader and more vertical-by-subreddit. Lemmy is the federated Reddit alternative and skews toward open-source enthusiasts. Mastodon is real-time conversation rather than threaded discussion. For most product and indie maker sites, an HN widget plus a Reddit widget plus a sister Dev.to or GitHub activity widget covers the complete tech-credibility surface. Looking forward, three things matter for the HN embed ecosystem. First, the Firebase API has shown no signs of moving paid or restricted, and the YC team has publicly reiterated its open-data stance. The Poper widget plans on that continuing. Second, HN's moderation tools (dang's flagging, the [dead] markers, the showdead opt-in) have stayed conservative and effective, which means embedded HN content is unusually low-risk for brand sites. The widget respects the [dead] and [flagged] markers by default. Third, Google's Discussions and forums rich-result surface has expanded steadily, which means the SEO upside of an embedded HN block has only grown since the schema went live. The widget will keep tracking those changes. As long as Y Combinator keeps the Firebase API open (which we expect indefinitely), the Hacker News Feed widget will be the lowest-friction, lowest-cost, highest-signal way to put HN momentum on your own domain.