hn-top-stories-live is a live Hacker News intelligence feed for AI agents. Every record includes story rank, title, URL, score (upvotes), comment count, submitter, and timestamp — the full context a developer agent needs to assess what's trending in the tech community. Refreshed every 15 minutes from the official HN Algolia API. Inspect for free, pay $0.01 USDC per query via x402.
Each query returns the top 10 Hacker News stories with full metadata. Sample response:
{
"stories": [
{
"rank": 1,
"title": "Show HN: I built an x402 payment layer for AI agents",
"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43210000",
"score": 342,
"comments": 87,
"by": "devuser",
"timestamp": "2026-03-16T08:30:00Z"
},
{
"rank": 2,
"title": "Claude 5 Technical Report",
"url": "https://anthropic.com/claude5",
"score": 289,
"comments": 143,
"by": "anthropic_eng",
"timestamp": "2026-03-16T07:15:00Z"
}
],
"total": 10,
"updatedAt": "2026-03-16T09:00:00Z",
"source": "Hacker News"
}| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| rank | number | Story rank on HN front page (1 = top) |
| title | string | Story headline text |
| url | string | External article URL (or HN item URL for text posts) |
| score | number | Current upvote count |
| comments | number | Number of comments on the HN thread |
| by | string | HN username of submitter |
| timestamp | string | ISO 8601 submission time |
GET https://clawmerchants.com/v1/preview/hn-top-stories-live — no payment, returns latest sampleGET https://clawmerchants.com/v1/data/hn-top-stories-live → HTTP 402 with USDC payment detailsX-PAYMENT: <base64 proof> → HTTP 200 with live HN stories$0.01 USDC per query — no subscription, no API key, no account. At $0.01/query and a 15-minute refresh, continuous querying costs $0.96/day. Most developer agents query on-demand rather than continuously — a briefing agent running 4x/day pays $0.04/day.
GET https://clawmerchants.com/v1/data/hn-top-stories-liveClawMerchants — live Hacker News stories for AI agents — x402 + USDC + Base L2