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📰 Hacker News Scraper

🚀 Export Hacker News stories, scores, rankings, and metadata in seconds. No account, no API key, no limits on your end.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-21 · 📊 12 fields per record · Up to 500 stories per run · Covers top, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN, and Jobs

The Hacker News Scraper pulls live story data from the official Hacker News Firebase API - the same source powering the HN website itself. Every run returns fresh, real-time data: story titles, URLs, scores, author handles, comment counts, post timestamps, and source domains. No HTML scraping, no fragile selectors - pure API data.

Hacker News surfaces the tech industry's most relevant links, discussions, and job postings daily. With this actor you can monitor trends, track viral stories, analyze community sentiment, or build content pipelines - all without writing a single line of code.

Coverage: Up to 500 stories per list type (top, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN, Jobs). All fields come directly from the Firebase API - scores and comment counts are live at scrape time.

🎯 Target Audience / Use Cases

📋 What the Hacker News Scraper does

• Fetches the ranked list of story IDs for your chosen list type (top / new / best / ask / show / job)
• Retrieves full item details for each story in parallel batches
• Extracts all key metadata: title, URL, score, author, comment count, rank, type, domain
• Converts Unix timestamps to ISO 8601 strings for easy downstream use
• Extracts clean domain names (e.g. github.com) from story URLs
• Caps output at your requested maxItems so you never pay for more than you need
• Pushes structured JSON records to the Apify dataset - ready for CSV, Excel, or API export

💡 Why it matters: Hacker News consistently surfaces high-quality technical content days or weeks before it trends elsewhere. Monitoring HN programmatically gives you an early-signal advantage over manual browsing.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon - video walkthrough of a full top-stories run with CSV export.

⚙️ Input

Example - Top 50 stories

{
"storyType":"top",
"maxItems":50
}

Example - Ask HN stories (preview)

{
"storyType":"ask",
"maxItems":10
}

⚠️ Good to Know: The Hacker News Firebase API returns up to 500 story IDs per list type. Setting maxItems above 500 will return all available stories for that list. Scores and comment counts reflect the moment of scraping - run again for updated numbers.

📊 Output

Each record contains these fields:

Sample records (real data from 2026-05-21)

[
{
"title":"Project Hail Mary - Stellar Navigation Chart",
"url":"https://valhovey.github.io/gaia-mary/",
"id":48225297,
"score":541,
"author":"speleo",
"commentCount":128,
"rank":1,
"type":"story",
"domain":"valhovey.github.io",
"postedAt":"2026-05-21T16:23:11.000Z",
"scrapedAt":"2026-05-22T01:16:08.037Z",
"error":null
},
{
"title":"The IBM-ification of Google?",
"url":"https://zeroshot.bearblog.dev/google-is-shattering-under-its-own-weight-the-ibm-ification-of-google/",
"id":48230049,
"score":29,
"author":"sabatonfan",
"commentCount":21,
"rank":2,
"type":"story",
"domain":"zeroshot.bearblog.dev",
"postedAt":"2026-05-21T23:30:10.000Z",
"scrapedAt":"2026-05-22T01:16:08.037Z",
"error":null
},
{
"title":"The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics",
"url":"https://davidoks.blog/p/ai-is-killing-the-cheap-smartphone",
"id":48229319,
"score":74,
"author":"d0ks",
"commentCount":19,
"rank":3,
"type":"story",
"domain":"davidoks.blog",
"postedAt":"2026-05-21T21:55:56.000Z",
"scrapedAt":"2026-05-22T01:16:08.037Z",
"error":null
}
]

✨ Why choose this Actor

📈 How it compares to alternatives

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account - includes $5 credit
2. Open the Hacker News Scraper actor page on Apify Store
3. Select a Story Type (top, new, best, ask, show, or job)
4. Set Max Items (10 for a preview, up to 500 for a full list)
5. Click Start and wait a few seconds
6. Download your dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML

💼 Business use cases

1. Content Intelligence

Monitor what the developer community upvotes most. Use top and best story feeds to find high-signal articles for newsletters, blog roundups, or social media curation. Schedule daily runs and auto-pipe results to Slack or Notion.

2. Trend Detection

Track which domains and authors consistently produce high-scoring stories. Identify rising topics before they go mainstream. Combine multiple daily runs into a time-series dataset to spot velocity trends.

3. Competitive Research

Monitor product launches, funding announcements, and technical articles related to your industry. Hacker News often surfaces coverage before it appears in tech media. Use the domain field to filter by source outlet.

4. Recruiting and Hiring

Scrape the monthly "Who is Hiring?" Ask HN threads (use storyType: ask and filter by title). Extract job listings from one of tech's most sought-after talent pools without paying for a job board subscription.

🔌 Automating Hacker News Scraper

Connect this actor to your favorite automation tools:

• Make (Integromat): Schedule runs and push results to Google Sheets, Airtable, or Slack
• Zapier: Trigger on new dataset items and post to your team's communication channels
• Apify Scheduler: Run every hour to track score changes throughout the day
• Apify API: Call programmatically from any language using the REST API
• Webhooks: Get notified when a run completes and process results in your own backend

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Research

Build academic datasets on technical community engagement, upvote dynamics, and content virality. HN's long history and consistent API make it ideal for longitudinal studies.

Creative Projects

Power a personal dashboard showing your favorite domains' latest HN appearances. Build a "HN digest" email newsletter with zero manual curation.

Non-Profit and Open Source

Track how open source projects and public-interest technology stories perform in the developer community. Use data to make the case for funding or visibility.

Experimentation

Test hypotheses about what kinds of titles, domains, or post times correlate with higher scores. Build ML models on historical HN data.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Not sure if this actor fits your use case? Drop this into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini:

"I want to monitor Hacker News top stories daily and export them to a spreadsheet. The actor is called Hacker News Scraper by ParseForge on Apify. It outputs fields like title, url, score, author, commentCount, rank, domain, and postedAt. Can you write me a Make scenario or Zapier workflow to automate this?"

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Does it require a Hacker News account?

No. The Firebase API is fully public. No authentication needed.

❓ How often is the data updated?

Each run fetches live data. Scores and comment counts reflect the exact moment you run the actor. There is no caching.

❓ What is the maximum number of stories I can get?

The Hacker News API returns up to 500 IDs per list type. Setting maxItems above 500 returns all available stories.

❓ Can I get historical stories?

The API only exposes current lists. For historical data, schedule recurring runs and accumulate your own dataset over time.

❓ What is the difference between "top" and "best"?

Top stories are ranked by a combination of score and recency (front page). Best stories are ranked purely by all-time score - older but highly-rated content appears here.

❓ Do Ask HN and Show HN stories have URLs?

Ask HN stories are text posts with no external URL (the url field will be null). Show HN stories usually link to an external project. Job posts may or may not have a URL.

❓ How fast does the scraper run?

A run of 100 stories typically completes in 5-10 seconds. 500 stories usually finishes in under 30 seconds.

❓ Can I schedule this to run automatically?

Yes. Use the Apify Scheduler to set up recurring runs (hourly, daily, weekly) without any additional setup.

❓ What happens if a story is deleted or flagged as dead?

Deleted and dead items are silently skipped. They will not appear in your dataset.

❓ Is my data export free?

Dataset exports (JSON, CSV, Excel, XML) are included with your Apify account. The first 10 items per run are always free.

❓ Can I filter by domain or author?

The actor returns all stories in the selected list. You can filter by domain or author after export using spreadsheet tools or the Apify dataset filter API.

❓ Does it work with the Apify API?

Yes. Every run creates a dataset accessible via the Apify REST API. You can poll for results, stream items, or integrate with any language.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Export your dataset in any format and connect it to the tools you already use:

Spreadsheets: Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc

Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Airtable, Notion

BI Tools: Tableau, Power BI, Metabase, Grafana

Automation: Make, Zapier, n8n, Activepieces

Cloud Storage: Google Drive, Dropbox, AWS S3

Communication: Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams (via webhook)

Code: REST API, Python, Node.js, Ruby, PHP

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This actor uses the official public Hacker News Firebase API (https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/). It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator or Hacker News. Use responsibly and in accordance with Hacker News terms of service.