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Hacker News Lead & Trend Monitor

Find Hacker News stories and comments that mention products, competitors, pain points, hiring needs, alternatives, startup ideas, and fresh market signals.

This Actor is built for lead generation, product research, founder research, trend monitoring, and competitive intelligence. It uses the public Hacker News Algolia API, so runs are fast, low-cost, and do not need a proxy by default.

What It Returns

• Hacker News stories and comments
• Original HN URL and external story URL when available
• Author, points, comment count, and publish time
• Source query for each row
• Relevance score and matched query terms
• Intent score and matched buyer/research keywords
• Optional content/comment text
• Monitoring mode for newly discovered rows

Common Uses

• Find people asking for alternatives to a tool
• Track startup/product launches around a keyword
• Monitor technical hiring and service demand
• Watch discussions around competitors
• Discover founder pain points and customer language
• Build prospecting lists from fresh HN conversations

Input Tips

Use several focused queries instead of one generic query.

Good examples:

• stripe alternative
• looking for crm
• need analytics
• shopify app
• open source billing
• ai automation agency

For lead generation, set minimumIntentScore to 1 or higher. For broad market research, keep it at 0.

Use maxResultsPerQuery when you provide several keywords and want balanced output. For example, with maxResults set to 500 and 5 queries, set maxResultsPerQuery to 100 so one popular query does not fill the entire run.

Result Limits

maxResults is a maximum cap, not a guarantee. The Actor only writes rows that pass the selected relevance and intent filters. If you ask for 500 rows but the filtered search only finds 160 useful matches, the Actor returns 160 clean rows instead of padding the dataset with irrelevant results.

The minimum maxResults is 50 so runs are commercially practical and users are charged for meaningful output.

Monitoring

Enable monitorChanges to compare the current run against the previous snapshot in the Actor key-value store.

When onlyChanges is enabled, the dataset contains only newly detected HN rows. When it is disabled, the dataset contains the current full result set while the change snapshot is still stored for automation.

Proxy Use

No proxy is needed by default. This Actor uses a public API and does not run a browser, which keeps speed high and usage cost low.

Output

Each dataset row represents one Hacker News story or comment. The primary output event is one dataset row.

Notes

This Actor is not affiliated with Hacker News, Y Combinator, or Algolia. It reads public search API results and stores structured rows in your Apify dataset.