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📰 Hacker News Scraper

Scrape stories, comments, and user data from Hacker News — the tech community's most popular link aggregator.

✨ Features

• Multiple feed modes: Top, New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN, and Job stories
• Full-text search: Search stories by keyword via the Algolia HN Search API
• User submissions: Fetch all stories submitted by a specific user
• Optional comments: Include top-level comments for each story
• No authentication required: Uses the official HN Firebase API and Algolia HN Search API

🔧 How It Works

1. Select a mode (top, new, best, ask, show, job, search, or user)
2. For search mode, provide a keyword query
3. For user mode, provide a HN username
4. Set the max results limit
5. Optionally enable top comments fetching (slower but richer data)

📋 Input Parameters

📦 Sample Output

{
"id":12345678,
"title":"Show HN: I built an open-source AI tool",
"url":"https://github.com/example/project",
"score":342,
"author":"johndoe",
"num_comments":87,
"created_at":"2026-03-23T10:30:00+00:00",
"type":"story",
"text":"",
"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678",
"top_comments":[
{
"id":12345679,
"author":"janedoe",
"text":"This is amazing! I've been looking for something like this.",
"created_at":"2026-03-23T10:45:00+00:00"
}
],
"fetched_at":"2026-03-23T12:00:00+00:00"
}

📊 Modes

⚡ Performance Notes

• Feed modes (top/new/best/ask/show/job): Each story requires a separate API call. 100 stories ≈ 15–30 seconds.
• Search mode: Uses Algolia's batch API, much faster. 100 results ≈ 2–5 seconds.
• With comments enabled: Adds ~5 extra API calls per story. Expect 2–3× longer run times.
• Rate limits: Both APIs are generous but the Actor includes retry logic for 429 responses.

🔗 Data Sources

• Hacker News Firebase API — Official real-time data
• Algolia HN Search API — Full-text search index