Today's HN top 10, ranked by score

Pulls the top 30 HN story IDs, fetches each item in parallel, sorts by score, prints the top 10. Pure public API + jq + xargs.

$ curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json" \
  | jq -r '.[0:30][]' \
  | xargs -P 10 -I {} curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{}.json" \
  | jq -s -r 'sort_by(-.score) | .[0:10] | .[] | "[\(.score)] \(.title) — \(.url // "discussion")"'

1. [01] curlcurl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json"
   Fetch the array of the current top-500 story IDs from HN's Firebase API. -s = silent (no progress bar).
2. [02] jqjq -r '.[0:30][]'
   Slice the first 30 IDs and emit one ID per line (raw, no quotes) so xargs can consume them.
3. [03] xargsxargs -P 10 -I {} curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{}.json"
   For each ID, hit the item endpoint. -P 10 runs up to 10 fetches in parallel; -I {} substitutes the ID into the URL.
4. [04] jqjq -s -r 'sort_by(-.score) | .[0:10] | .[] | "[\(.score)] \(.title) — \(.url // …
   -s slurps all 30 JSON items into one array. Sort by negative score (descending), take top 10, format each as a line with score, title, and URL (falling back to 'discussion' for Ask HN-style posts with no URL).

[523] Show HN: We built a vector DB in 200 lines of Rust — https://example.com/vdb
[412] Apple Silicon M5 Pro benchmarks — https://example.com/m5
[388] The hidden cost of LLM batching — https://example.com/batching
... 7 more lines

• Score is a snapshot — repeat to see ranking shift through the day.
• xargs -P value: don't set higher than 20; HN rate-limits aggressive clients.