Pricing

Rating

Developer

Actor stats

Categories

Share

🟠 Hacker News Scraper

Scrape Hacker News stories, comments, polls, jobs, and Ask/Show HN posts. Search by keyword + date range, pull full HN lists (front page, new, best, ask, show, jobs), or fetch any user's complete activity.

⚡ Uses HN's official Algolia + Firebase APIs. No login, no rate-limit nightmares, no scraping HTML.

✨ What you can do

• 🔎 Keyword search with date range, tag filter, min-points threshold, and sort by relevance/date/points
• 📋 Pull any HN list — top, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs
• 👤 Get any user's full activity — stories AND comments, by username
• 💬 Optionally fetch full comment trees — flattened with parent IDs (great for AI training)

🚀 Quick start

1. Click Try for free
2. Pick mode: search, list, or user
3. Enter targets
4. Click Start

📥 Input examples

Search for "claude" stories from the last month with 50+ points

{
"mode":"search",
"searchQueries":["claude"],
"tags":"story",
"sortBy":"points",
"since":"2026-04-01",
"minPoints":50,
"maxItems":500,
"includeComments":true
}

Pull current front page

{
"mode":"list",
"listType":"topstories",
"maxItems":30,
"includeComments":true,
"maxCommentsPerStory":50
}

Get pg's recent activity

{
"mode":"user",
"users":["pg","dang"],
"maxItems":100
}

📤 Output (per item)

{
"type":"story",
"id":12345678,
"title":"Show HN: A new way to scrape data",
"text":null,
"author":"username",
"points":234,
"numComments":87,
"createdAt":"2026-04-15T12:34:56.000Z",
"url":"https://example.com/article",
"hnUrl":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678",
"tags":["story","front_page"],
"comments":[
{
"type":"comment",
"id":12345679,
"text":"Great post!",
"author":"commenter",
"points":12,
"createdAt":"2026-04-15T13:00:00.000Z",
"parentId":12345678
}
]
}

🎯 Use cases

⚙️ Tech notes

• Search uses HN's Algolia API — fast, fielded, supports complex queries
• Lists & item details use HN's Firebase API — official, real-time
• No auth required, no API key needed, no rate-limit (within reason)
• Comments are fetched recursively from Firebase for accuracy and full trees

❓ FAQ

Will I get rate-limited? HN is generous — the Algolia API is unmetered for reasonable use. Comment-tree scraping at large scale is slower because each item is a separate Firebase call.

Are deleted/dead items included? No — they're filtered automatically.

Can I scrape historical data? Yes. Use since and until in search mode to pull any historical date range. HN's archive goes back to 2007.

Schedule it? Yes — set up an Apify Schedule for daily/hourly trend tracking.