Get a Hacker News story’s comments

Try in Playground

Retrieve a nested Hacker News comment tree with comment fields and children. Bound the walk with depth and limit to read only the levels you need. Deleted comments retain null author and text values, and coverage describes the returned tree.

GET/v1/hackernews/story/commentsx-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

idstringrequiredquery

Required numeric Hacker News item ID; a comment ID returns that comment’s subtree.

Example8863

depthstringquery

Reply levels to return, 1–128; top-level comments are depth 1. Defaults to the whole tree. Truncated levels report depth_limit partial coverage.

Example2

limitstringquery

Maximum comment nodes to return, 1–5,000; defaults to 5,000. A truncated tree reports comment_limit partial coverage.

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.

idinteger

Required numeric Hacker News item ID; a comment ID returns that comment’s subtree.

≥ 1

typestring

Source type of the requested item.

min 1 chars

commentCountinteger

Number of comment nodes returned across all levels.

≥ 0

maxDepthinteger

Deepest reply level present in the returned tree.

≥ 0

commentsobject[]

Nested source comment nodes: id, author, text, created_at, created_at_i, parent_id, story_id, points, type, childCount (replies the source holds, including any not returned) and children, recursively, in source order.

up to 5000 items

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/story/comments?id=8863&depth=2" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

const response = await fetch(
  "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/hackernews/story/comments?id=8863&depth=2",
  {
    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/story/comments?id=8863&depth=2",
  {
    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/story/comments",
    headers={"x-api-key": "YOUR_API_KEY"},
    params={
        "id": "8863",
        "depth": "2"
    },
    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/story/comments?id=8863&depth=2", 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/story/comments?id=8863&depth=2"))
            .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/item?id=8863",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-09-11T00:00:00.000Z",
  "coverage": {
    "source": "public_api",
    "complete": true,
    "warnings": []
  },
  "accounting": {
    "upstreamRequests": 1,
    "responseBytes": 41000,
    "durationMs": 220
  },
  "id": 8863,
  "type": "story",
  "commentCount": 2,
  "comments": [
    {
      "id": 8865,
      "created_at": "2007-04-04T19:22:55.000Z",
      "created_at_i": 1175714575,
      "type": "comment",
      "author": "example",
      "title": null,
      "url": null,
      "text": "A synthetic top-level comment.",
      "points": null,
      "parent_id": 8863,
      "story_id": 8863,
      "options": [],
      "children": [
        {
          "id": 9007,
          "created_at": "2007-04-05T01:48:11.000Z",
          "created_at_i": 1175737691,
          "type": "comment",
          "author": "replier",
          "title": null,
          "url": null,
          "text": "A synthetic reply.",
          "points": null,
          "parent_id": 8865,
          "story_id": 8863,
          "options": [],
          "children": [],
          "childCount": 0
        }
      ],
      "childCount": 1
    }
  ],
  "maxDepth": 2
}

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."
  }
}