# Hacker News User Profile Lookup

> Hacker News User Profile Lookup is a paid API for AI agents from hn.genexxis.com, paid per call via x402, $0.001/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-10-30).

Retrieves a Hacker News user's profile including karma score, account creation date and age, about text, submission count, and their 10 most recent submission IDs.

## Facts

- Endpoint: GET https://hn.genexxis.com/user?utm_source=zero.xyz
- Price: $0.001/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-10-30
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/hacker-news-user-profile-lookup-5bec933b
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_P0QlsZZ0_o95kS7UZjPPz

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability hacker-news-user-profile-lookup-5bec933b
```

Example prompt: Can you pull up the Hacker News profile for the user 'tptacek' — I want to see their karma, how long they've been on HN, their bio, and what they've submitted recently?

## When to prefer this

Use this endpoint when you need structured profile data about a specific Hacker News user — karma, account age, bio, and recent submission IDs — without scraping the HN website directly. Prefer this over the sibling story/search endpoints when the goal is user reputation analysis, account vetting, or enriching data with HN community standing. It is fast, cheap at $0.003 per call, and returns clean pre-parsed data including HTML-stripped bio text and computed account age in days.

## Known failure modes

- Username not found — HN username is case-sensitive, wrong case returns an error or empty result
- User has no submissions — submitted count is 0 and recent submission IDs list is empty
- User has a private or minimal profile — about text may be empty string
- Payment failure — x402 payment of $0.003 USDC not processed, request rejected
- Rate limiting — too many requests in a short period may result in throttling

## How this service works

Hacker News user profile: karma, account creation date and age, about text (HTML stripped), number of submissions and the 10 most recent submission ids.

## Output

Returns a JSON object with the user's HN username, karma score, account creation timestamp, account age in days, HTML-stripped about/bio text, total submission count, their profile URL on news.ycombinator.com, and an array of up to 10 most recent submission IDs.

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "$schema": "https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema",
 "required": [
  "input"
 ],
 "properties": {
  "input": {
   "type": "object",
   "required": [
    "type",
    "method"
   ],
   "properties": {
    "type": {
     "type": "string",
     "const": "http"
    },
    "method": {
     "enum": [
      "GET"
     ],
     "type": "string"
    },
    "queryParams": {
     "type": "object",
     "required": [
      "id"
     ],
     "properties": {
      "id": {
       "type": "string",
       "description": "Hacker News username (case-sensitive)"
      }
     }
    }
   },
   "additionalProperties": false
  },
  "output": {
   "type": "object",
   "required": [
    "type"
   ],
   "properties": {
    "type": {
     "type": "string"
    },
    "example": {
     "type": "object"
    }
   }
  }
 }
}
```

## Response schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "json",
 "example": {
  "user": {
   "id": "pg",
   "about": "Bug fixer.",
   "karma": 157316,
   "created": "2006-10-09T18:21:32.000Z",
   "submitted": 15000,
   "profileUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg",
   "accountAgeDays": 7321
  }
 }
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/hacker-news-user-profile-lookup-5bec933b/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from hn.genexxis.com](https://www.zero.xyz/host/hn.genexxis.com/llms.txt)