Read a thread

hn item fetches one item and, by default, its top-level comments. It accepts a bare id or a pasted URL:

hn item 48517377
hn item https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377

The first record is the story; the rest are comments, each carrying a depth so you can see where it sits in the tree.

Control the depth

--depth sets how far down the tree hn walks:

hn item 48517377 --depth 0     # the story only, no comments
hn item 48517377 --depth 1     # story plus direct replies (the default)
hn item 48517377 --depth 3     # three levels deep
hn item 48517377 --depth -1    # the entire thread

Comment trees are fetched concurrently, so even a full thread comes back fast. Tune the parallelism with -j if you want to be gentler on the API.

Just the comment text

The comment bodies arrive as plain text, with HTML tags stripped and entities decoded, so they read cleanly in a terminal or a pipe:

hn item 48517377 --depth -1 --fields depth,by,text

# every top-level commenter on a thread
hn item 48517377 --depth 1 -o jsonl | jq -r '.by'