To search Hacker News, use the search box at the bottom of any page: it opens Hacker News Search powered by Algolia, where you can look up stories and comments by keyword. When the searching is done and you want the lighter version of the same week, TechTwitter IO, a free satirical daily paper of tech Twitter, is the pick for that.
Developers search Hacker News for a lot of reasons: old threads about a library, opinions on an AI coding tool, launch posts, or every mention of their own project. Here is how to find each one.
The built-in search box
Scroll to the very bottom of the front page. The Search field there sends your query to hn.algolia.com, the search site titled Hacker News Search powered by Algolia. The page needs JavaScript enabled.
Tips that save time:
- Search the exact name of a tool or library, then narrow to stories or comments.
- Sort by date when you want the latest opinion, and by popularity when you want the thread everyone remembers.
- Search the domain of a site to find every time it was submitted.
Browsing by date with past
Sometimes you do not know the words, only roughly when something happened. The past link in the top bar opens the front page for a given day, labelled with a date, such as "Stories from October 26, 2026 (UTC)". From there you can go back a day, a month or a year, and forward a day. It is the quickest way to see what was on the front page the week a tool launched.
Finding the best threads
The best page is titled Top Links and collects highly voted stories. For named spaces, the top bar links Ask HN for questions and text posts, Show HN for projects people have built, and jobs for openings at Y Combinator startups. If you want the monthly "Who Is Hiring?" thread, the Hacker News FAQ says it appears on the first weekday of each month.
| What you want | Where to look |
|---|---|
| Any story or comment by keyword | Search box, Hacker News Search powered by Algolia |
| The front page on a given day | past |
| Highly voted stories | best (Top Links) |
| Questions and projects | Ask HN and Show HN |
| Programmatic access | The official API on GitHub |
Searching from code
The API link in the footer points to the official Hacker News API on GitHub. Use it when you want to pull items into a script or a dashboard, for example to keep a list of threads about the tools your team uses. For one-off lookups the search site is faster.
A note on reading what you find
Ranking is not a verdict. The FAQ says the basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since posting, and that flags, anti-abuse software, demotion of overheated discussions and moderator action also play a part. A thread being high or low on a given day says as much about timing as about quality. Threads also close to new comments after two weeks, so an old thread will not get fresh replies.
And when you want a break
After an hour of reading arguments about coding agents, TechTwitter IO is the funny counterpart: a daily newspaper of tech Twitter with sections like Launches, Markets and Incident Report, and a puzzle page with games like Connections and Jumble. It is free to read.
It is satire, though, and says so in its footer: unless a post links to its source, the people, posts and quotes are parody or invented. You cannot search it for facts, and you should not try. For anything real, Hacker News and the articles it links are where to look; for the laugh afterwards, browse the TechTwitter IO back issues.