HackerNews vs Lanyard

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.

Lanyard exposes a Discord user's live presence — online status, current activities (games, Spotify listening data), and any custom key-value data set via their Discord bio — over a free public REST endpoint or a subscribable WebSocket feed, with no authentication required. The catch is that both the requester and the target user must share a Discord server with Lanyard's bot, since Discord's gateway only surfaces presence data for mutual-guild members.