Check if a Hacker News username is taken

What we check on Hacker News

Standard tier - checked on every full lookup

Hacker News is checked from a username. The response says whether that handle exists on Hacker News - registered: true or registered: false - with the moment that was established in checkedAt. An email address on its own cannot reach Hacker News; if you only have an email, its local part is tried as a handle and any hit is labelled as derived, never counted as a confirmed match.

Hacker News is checked on every full lookup (?wait=true or streaming), alongside every other platform. It is not in the sub-second instant subset, which is reserved for the highest-value platforms for each input type.

If Hacker News blocks the check, times out, or answers ambiguously, it is omitted from results[] entirely rather than returned as registered: false. Absence from the response means "unconfirmed", never "no account".

Who checks Hacker News accounts

Developer accounts are checked by SaaS, cloud and API businesses that give away free trials, credits or compute. A real developer usually has years of history on code hosting and developer communities; an address that exists nowhere in that world, signing up for free GPU hours, is a classic trial-abuse pattern.

More on this: Signup fraud prevention.

Inputs Hacker News accepts

• Username: send the handle as query. Hacker News is checked for that exact handle - useful when a person reuses the same name across platforms.

One request

curl -X POST "https://api.digifootprint.dev/v2/lookup?wait=true" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer dfp_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "someuser"}'

What a Hacker News result looks like

{
  "platform": "hackernews",
  "registered": true,
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-15T09:53:20.721Z",
  "identity": "username"
}

The full response shape - breaches, web mentions, matches versus socialMatches, and what method means - is in running a lookup.

Related platforms

Every one of these is checked in the same request as Hacker News.

More developer platforms: Docker Hub, Pastebin, CodePen, GitLab, Codecademy, Kaggle · all developer

Hacker News lookup FAQ

Can I check a phone number on Hacker News?

Not directly. Hacker News can be reached from username. Phone numbers are checked on the messaging and social apps that sign people up by phone.

How fast is a Hacker News check?

Hacker News is checked on a full lookup, which streams results as they land - the first matches arrive in around 60 milliseconds and the whole set typically completes in a few seconds.

What happens if Hacker News blocks the check?

Hacker News is left out of the response. We never report a platform we could not confirm as "not registered" - a missing platform means unconfirmed, not absent.

Does the API return the Hacker News account details?

No. You get whether an account exists for the input you sent, and when that was established. No profile contents, photos, followers or private data are collected or returned.