Hacker News API The hackeRnews package allows the retrieve this data in form of convenient R objects. Each object (story, comment, …) has a unique id and can be retrieved using this id. The API also provides a way to fetch up to 500 top and new stories, latest best stories, ask stories, show stories and job stories.

On Hacker News, users receive Karma whenever another user upvotes a submission or comment they made, which incentivizes positive contributions to the community.

There's no stats page but last I checked it was around 5M monthly unique users (depending on how you count them), perhaps 10M page views a day (including a guess at API traffic), and something like 1300 submissions (stories) and 13k comments a day.

However, unlike Reddit where new users can immediately both upvote and downvote content, Hacker News does not allow users to downvote content until they have accumulated 501 "karma" points.