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Hacker News Scraper — Stories, Comments & Jobs

Extract stories, comments, jobs, Ask HN, and Show HN from Hacker News. Filter by keyword, date, points, and author. Fetch entire comment threads. No browser, no proxies, no auth needed.

Who is this for?

• Developers & researchers tracking tech trends, AI news, or startup discussions
• Recruiters extracting job listings from monthly "Who is Hiring" threads
• Marketers monitoring Show HN launches and community sentiment
• Data analysts building HN datasets for LLMs, RAG pipelines, or dashboards
• Anyone who wants to schedule automatic HN monitoring without writing code

Why this scraper?

• 128 MB memory, 2–30 sec per run — smallest Apify tier, lowest cost possible
• No browser, no proxies — uses Algolia Search API + HN Firebase API directly
• Full comment threads — fetch every comment for any story with one toggle
• Dual mode — full-text search (Algolia) or live feeds (Firebase top/new/best)
• Clean output — HTML stripped, hnUrl always present, domain extracted

Input

Output

Story

{
"id":"39930210",
"type":"story",
"title":"Show HN: I built a HN scraper",
"url":"https://github.com/example/hn-scraper",
"hnUrl":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39930210",
"domain":"github.com",
"author":"pg",
"points":342,
"commentCount":87,
"tags":["story","author_pg"],
"publishedAt":"2024-03-15T10:30:00.000Z",
"scrapedAt":"2026-05-25T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Comment

{
"id":"39930300",
"type":"comment",
"text":"Great work! How do you handle rate limits?",
"author":"dang",
"storyId":"39930210",
"storyTitle":"Show HN: I built a HN scraper",
"hnUrl":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39930300",
"publishedAt":"2024-03-15T11:00:00.000Z",
"scrapedAt":"2026-05-25T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Export in JSON, CSV, Excel, XML directly from Apify Console.

Example use cases

Get today's top 30 stories:

{"mode":"feed","feedType":"top","maxItems":30}

Track AI stories with 100+ points this month:

{
"mode":"search",
"query":"artificial intelligence",
"type":"story",
"sortBy":"date",
"minPoints":100,
"dateFrom":"2024-06-01",
"maxItems":50
}

Extract all comments from a specific story (great for LLM input):

{"storyId":"39930210","type":"comment","maxItems":1000}

Scrape the monthly "Who is Hiring" thread:

{
"mode":"search",
"query":"ask hn who is hiring",
"type":"ask_hn",
"sortBy":"date",
"maxItems":5
}

Monitor all new Show HN launches:

{"mode":"feed","feedType":"show","maxItems":50}

Get all stories + their comments in one run:

{
"mode":"search",
"query":"rust programming",
"type":"story",
"minPoints":50,
"maxItems":20,
"includeComments":true
}

Schedule daily monitoring

Run this actor on a schedule to track any HN topic automatically.

1. Open the actor and click Schedule
2. Set frequency (daily, weekly, or custom cron)
3. Results accumulate in your dataset — ready to export or pipe into your app

No code required.

APIs used

Support

Found a bug or need a feature? Open an issue and I'll get back to you quickly.