Social · head-to-head
Facebook vs HackerNews
Meta's Graph API is the single HTTP interface behind Facebook Login, Page management, and Social Plugins, exposing versioned endpoints under graph.facebook.com that read and write data about people, Pages, and Groups once a user grants OAuth permissions. Most scopes that touch another person's data or a business Page require Meta's app review process before they work outside development mode, and the same Graph API infrastructure also underlies Instagram's Business API stack.
The official Hacker News API is a read-only Firebase-backed REST feed publishing items (stories, comments, jobs, polls) and user profiles as simple JSON, with helper endpoints for the current top/new/best/ask/show/job story ID lists. It requires no API key or registration, updates roughly every 30 seconds to reflect live site activity, and has stayed structurally unchanged since Y Combinator open-sourced it in 2015.
| HackerNews | ||
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | OAuth | None |
| Pricing | free | free |
| Formats | JSON | JSON |
| CORS | yes | yes |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
HackerNews needs no API key, while Facebook requires OAuth — pick HackerNews to start without signup.