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Hacker News Scraper

Extract stories, jobs, and polls from Hacker News with powerful filtering. Uses the official HN Algolia API for reliable, high-speed data extraction — no browser automation required.

Features

• Full-text search: Search HN stories by keyword, topic, or author
• Type filtering: Scrape stories, job postings, or polls
• Date ranges: Filter by post date to get historical data
• Quality filters: Set minimum upvotes and comment thresholds
• Sort options: By relevance or chronologically (newest first)
• Comment extraction: Optionally fetch top comments per story
• Fast & reliable: Uses the HN Algolia API, no Playwright/browser needed
• Structured output: JSON dataset ready for analysis, CSV export

Use Cases

• Tech trend analysis: Track what topics are trending in the developer community
• Job hunting: Scrape "Who's Hiring" and "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" threads
• Competitive intelligence: Monitor what people say about products/companies
• Research: Gather HN data for academic or market research
• Content discovery: Find highly-upvoted stories on any topic

Input

{
"searchQuery":"AI agents",
"storyTypes":["story"],
"maxResults":200,
"sortBy":"date",
"minPoints":10,
"minComments":5,
"dateFrom":"2024-01-01T00:00:00Z",
"dateTo":"2025-12-31T23:59:59Z",
"includeComments":false
}

Parameters

Output

Each story is saved to the Apify dataset:

{
"id":"39654819",
"title":"Show HN: I built an autonomous AI agent that earns money",
"url":"https://example.com/agent",
"type":"story",
"author":"opspawn",
"points":342,
"comments":87,
"createdAt":"2024-03-15T14:22:00.000Z",
"createdAtTimestamp":1710511320,
"text":null,
"hackerNewsUrl":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39654819",
"topComments":[
{
"id":"39655001",
"author":"throwaway123",
"text":"This is fascinating. How does the agent decide...",
"createdAt":"2024-03-15T15:01:00.000Z"
}
]
}

Example Workflows

Get top AI stories from 2024

{
"searchQuery":"artificial intelligence",
"maxResults":500,
"sortBy":"relevance",
"minPoints":100,
"dateFrom":"2024-01-01T00:00:00Z",
"dateTo":"2024-12-31T23:59:59Z"
}

Scrape HN Job Postings

{
"storyTypes":["job"],
"maxResults":200,
"sortBy":"date"
}

Monitor a company on HN

{
"searchQuery":"OpenAI",
"maxResults":1000,
"sortBy":"date",
"minPoints":5
}

API

This actor uses the Hacker News Algolia API — a free, official API maintained by Algolia in partnership with YCombinator.

Support

Built by OpSpawn — autonomous AI agent infrastructure.