Get a Hacker News profile

Try in Playground

Retrieve a public Hacker News user from the official API by case-sensitive username: karma, account creation time, the about text when present, and the count of submitted items.

GET/v1/hackernews/profilex-api-key

Headers

Get your API key

x-api-keystringrequiredheader

Your ScrapeAtlas customer key. Create one on /account/ and set SCRAPEATLAS_API_KEY.

Query parameters

handlestringrequiredquery

Required case-sensitive Hacker News username: 2–15 letters, digits, underscores or hyphens, as shown after user?id= on news.ycombinator.com.

Examplepg

Response fields

requestIdstring

Request correlation identifier.

HTTP attempts, decoded bytes and duration for the operation, including the single shared retry.

accounting.upstreamRequestsinteger

Always included.

≥ 0

accounting.responseBytesinteger

Always included.

≥ 0

accounting.durationMsnumber

Always included.

≥ 0

successboolean

True when usable data is returned; inspect status and coverage for omissions.

statusenum

success, partial, failed, or challenged. HTTP 200 can be partial.

one of: success, partial

sourceUrlstring

Public Hacker News search, item or user URL for the request.

absolute HTTPS URL

fetchedAtstring

UTC retrieval time.

Complete means this bounded page or tree was returned without known omissions. It does not imply all matching items were enumerated.

coverage.sourcestring

Always included.

coverage.completeboolean

Always included.

coverage.warningsstring[]

Always included.

idstring

Source username.

min 1 chars

createdinteger

Account creation Unix time in seconds.

karmainteger

Current source karma.

aboutstringoptional

Profile about text in source HTML; omitted when the user has none.

submittedCountinteger

Number of item IDs in the source submitted list.

≥ 0

HTTP 200 returns the success variant. Check status: partial means usable data with warnings, and failed or challenged requests carry a failure object described in Errors & responses.

Error codes

HTTP	failure.code	Meaning
200	`partial`	Usable data with comment_limit, depth_limit, children_limit or counts_unavailable warnings.
400	`invalid_request`	Missing, duplicate, malformed or unsupported parameters, including a search that selects nothing.
401	`unauthorized`	Missing or invalid worker API key.
404	`not_found`	The source reports a missing item or user.
429	`upstream_rate_limited`	Source throttling; no automatic retry.
502	`upstream_challenged`	Source rejected the unauthenticated request.
502	`unsupported_page`	Malformed, mismatched or non-JSON source data.
502	`response_too_large` `payload_too_complex`	Response exceeded byte or parsing limits.
502	`unsafe_redirect` `request_limit` `upstream_error`	Bounded source retrieval could not complete.
503	`busy`	All worker slots are occupied.
504	`timeout`	Total request deadline expired.

Code example

curl "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/hackernews/profile?handle=pg" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

const response = await fetch(
  "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/hackernews/profile?handle=pg",
  {
    headers: {
      "x-api-key": "YOUR_API_KEY"
    }
  }
);

const data = await response.json();
console.log(data.status, data);

type Result = {
  status: "success" | "partial" | "failed" | "challenged";
  requestId: string;
  [field: string]: unknown;
};

const response = await fetch(
  "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/hackernews/profile?handle=pg",
  {
    headers: {
      "x-api-key": process.env.SCRAPEATLAS_API_KEY!
    }
  }
);

const data = (await response.json()) as Result;
if (data.status === "failed" || data.status === "challenged") {
  throw new Error(`Hacker News request failed: ${data.requestId}`);
}
console.log(data);

import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/hackernews/profile",
    headers={"x-api-key": "YOUR_API_KEY"},
    params={
        "handle": "pg"
    },
    timeout=60,
)
data = response.json()
print(data["status"], data)

package main

import (
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
)

func main() {
	req, _ := http.NewRequest("GET", "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/hackernews/profile?handle=pg", nil)
	req.Header.Set("x-api-key", "YOUR_API_KEY")
	resp, err := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	var data map[string]interface{}
	json.NewDecoder(resp.Body).Decode(&data)
	fmt.Println(data["status"], data)
}

import java.net.URI;
import java.net.http.HttpClient;
import java.net.http.HttpRequest;
import java.net.http.HttpResponse;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        var client = HttpClient.newHttpClient();
        var request = HttpRequest.newBuilder()
            .uri(URI.create("https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/hackernews/profile?handle=pg"))
            .GET()
            .header("x-api-key", "YOUR_API_KEY")
            .build();
        var response = client.send(request, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofString());
        System.out.println(response.body());
    }
}

Use your sa_live_… customer key at https://api.scrapeatlas.com.

Responses

Successful result. Synthetic example validated against the runtime contract.

{
  "success": true,
  "status": "success",
  "requestId": "00000000-0000-4000-8000-000000000001",
  "sourceUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-09-11T00:00:00.000Z",
  "coverage": {
    "source": "public_api",
    "complete": true,
    "warnings": []
  },
  "accounting": {
    "upstreamRequests": 1,
    "responseBytes": 114000,
    "durationMs": 260
  },
  "id": "pg",
  "created": 1160418092,
  "karma": 157316,
  "about": "Bug fixer.",
  "submittedCount": 15565
}

Missing, duplicate, malformed or unsupported parameters, including a search that selects nothing.

{
  "requestId": "9d2f1c0a-6b1e-4c7d-9a8e-2f3b4c5d6e7f",
  "accounting": {
    "upstreamRequests": 0,
    "responseBytes": 0,
    "durationMs": 0
  },
  "success": false,
  "status": "failed",
  "failure": {
    "code": "invalid_request",
    "message": "Invalid request: missing, duplicate, unsupported or malformed parameters."
  }
}