The official Firebase API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API) requires
multiple network
connections to be made in order to fetch the list of Top Stories
(indices) and then the
summary content of these stories. Directly requesting these resources
makes server-side
rendering cumbersome as it is slow and ultimately requires that you
maintain your own
cache to ensure full server renders are efficient.

To work around this problem, we can use one of the unofficial Hacker
News APIs, specifically
https://github.com/cheeaun/node-hnapi which directly returns the Top
Stories and can cache
responses for 10 minutes. In ReactHN, we can use the unofficial API for
a static server-side
render and then 'hydrate' this once our components have mounted to
display the real-time
experience.

The benefit of this is clients loading up the app that are on flakey
networks (or lie-fi)
can still get a fast render of content before the rest of our
JavaScript bundle is loaded.