Hacker News on a US Phone Network, Two Honest Hours

Hacker News is a plain site with a free public API and a strong set of rules, and there is very little a proxy can do for you there that is also allowed. The few things that are allowed are worth two dollars: looking at your own launch post and the page it links to the way a reader on a phone in the US sees them, and developing a reader app or research script against the API from an address nobody else is using. HourlyProxies rents a dedicated US 4G or 5G line for two hours, no subscription, for exactly that kind of short job.

Your launch page under mobile conditions

A large share of Hacker News traffic arrives from phones in the first hour after a post lands, and your landing page gets judged on that. Route a browser through a US carrier line and open the page from the comments thread: time to first paint on 4G, whether the hero image is heavy, whether a sign-up modal blocks the content, whether the site holds up when the address is a carrier one shared with other subscribers. 4G usually gives 20 to 45 Mbps and 5G 50 Mbps and up, depending on signal, and that is the range most readers are on.

Do this before you post, not after. Two hours the day before a Show HN is cheaper than a comment thread about a broken page.

One more thing worth doing while the clock runs: open your own site through the line on a phone-sized viewport, not just a desktop browser routed through it. Carrier latency and a small screen together are what the first wave of readers actually gets, and a page that loads a large hero image before the text will lose some of them before the first paragraph. Fix that in the hour before you post, not the hour after.

Building against the API

The official Hacker News API is public, needs no key and is served from a CDN, but the site itself applies rate limiting per address to page fetches. If you build a reader, a digest tool or a dataset for a paper, develop it on a dedicated line so that any refusal you see is caused by your own pacing. Use the API rather than fetching HTML, cache aggressively and keep the request rate low. Dedicated means only your traffic is on the address, so the picture is clean.

Research projects that need the full archive should use the API's item range or the public datasets on BigQuery rather than crawling.

The reading experience itself

Designers and engineers working on HN clients can open the real site through the line to compare their rendering with the original on a slow link, check the logged-out view and see how the page handles the small screen. Open your own account only if you need to compare logged-in states, and do it on a sticky address rather than rotating mid-session.

Two hours, priced plainly

4G costs $2 for the first two hours and $2 per extra hour; 5G costs $3 and $3. Four hours is the most one purchase holds and it never renews. Keep the line through the day and the paid hours count toward the $5 or $6 day price. Each line is a real SIM in a modem we own in New York, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami or North Carolina, on AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon, with HTTP(S) and SOCKS5, unlimited data under fair use, rotation on demand and free moves.

• Preview your launch page as a US phone reader
• Develop API clients on an address with no history
• Logged-out and logged-in views compared on one sticky address
• The meter stops on its own

What Hacker News forbids and so do we

Voting rings, sockpuppet accounts, upvoting your own post from other identities, evading a ban and scraping the site at speed. None of these are things we sell lines for, and accounts that use them that way are closed. Post once, from your own account, and let the readers decide.

Setting up a Hacker News proxy on HourlyProxies

1. Buy two hours on 4G or 5G in any US city we serve.
2. Set the proxy in a clean browser profile and in your API client.
3. Open your landing page from the thread and watch it load on a carrier link.
4. Run your API client at a slow, cached pace and confirm it is never refused.
5. Fix what you found and let the line expire.

Hacker News proxy questions