HackerNews vs Open Collective

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.

Open Collective's GraphQL API (v2) queries collectives, expenses, transactions, and members for the platform's transparent nonprofit/open-source funding model, and public collective data is readable with no authentication at all. Its own docs flag the older REST API as still running but no longer developed, pointing new integrations at the GraphQL surface and a companion PDF service (for receipts and invoices) that accepts either a personal token or an OAuth bearer token. A personal access token, not a full OAuth app-review flow, is the documented way to authenticate for private or write access.