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Hacker News Scraper

Scrape stories, comments, and user data from Hacker News — Y Combinator's tech news aggregator. Uses the official Firebase HN API for fast, reliable data extraction.

What can it do?

• Top stories — Current front page stories ranked by score
• New stories — Latest submissions as they appear
• Best stories — Highest-rated stories of all time
• Ask HN — Community questions and discussions
• Show HN — Project launches and demos
• Job stories — YC startup job postings
• Single story — Full details + comment tree for any story
• User profile — Karma, about, submission count

Why use this scraper?

• ⚡ Fast — Official Firebase API, no browser automation needed
• 🔄 Reliable — Auto-retry with exponential backoff
• 🧵 Nested comments — Full comment trees with depth tracking
• 📊 Rich metadata — Score, author, time, descendants count
• 🔗 Direct links — Both source URL and HN discussion URL

Input examples

Get top 30 stories

{
"mode":"top_stories",
"maxItems":30
}

Get newest submissions

{
"mode":"new_stories",
"maxItems":50
}

Get Ask HN posts

{
"mode":"ask_stories",
"maxItems":20
}

Get story with all comments

{
"mode":"single_story",
"storyId":12345678,
"includeComments":true
}

Output example

{
"id":12345678,
"title":"Show HN: I built an open-source alternative to X",
"url":"https://github.com/example/project",
"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678",
"score":423,
"by":"author",
"time":"2026-03-01T15:30:00Z",
"descendants":156,
"type":"story"
}

Use cases

• Tech trend analysis — Track what's hot in the developer community
• Content marketing — Find popular topics for blog posts
• Startup research — Monitor YC job postings and Show HN launches
• Competitive intelligence — Track mentions of products/technologies
• Data science — Build datasets for NLP and sentiment analysis

Pricing

Free to use. You only pay for Apify platform usage (compute and storage).

Limitations

• HN API returns max 500 story IDs per category
• Comment fetching is sequential (HN API returns one item at a time)
• Rate limiting handled automatically