Hacker News Topic Monitor — Stories & Engagement

Enter a topic or brand keyword. Export matching Hacker News stories with links, points and comment counts. Filter engagement and dates, and return only new or updated stories on later runs.

No source API key or external AI subscription is required. Export results as JSON, CSV or Excel; JSON keeps nested fields intact.

Start with a working example

{
  "query": "automation",
  "sortBy": "relevance",
  "maxResults": 3,
  "maxPages": 1
}

Supported scope

Uses the public Algolia Hacker News search API, not profiles or comment bodies. Search matching and indexing are controlled by Algolia; results are not exhaustive. Search caps can restrict deep results. Up to 10 pages, 50 stories per page. Points/comment-count changes emit UPDATED. Date filters are UTC. No external linked pages are fetched.

Source documentation: https://hn.algolia.com/api

Real output example

The following values came from a real test run; values may change.

title	domain	points	comments	publishedAt	discussionUrl
Open-Source Home Automation	home-assistant.io	869	231	2019-11-29T16:06:31Z	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21665125
Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)	blog.danslimmon.com	804	230	2021-11-02T16:15:25Z	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083367

Pricing

$1 per 1,000 delivered story records, plus $0.001 per run start at 512 MB–1 GB. Native Apify pay-per-event; one result event per successfully delivered row, with no separate automatic dataset-row event. Empty runs still have a start charge. Platform terms and the pricing tab apply. Set Maximum cost per run as well as maxResults. Failed sources do not produce billed error rows.

Monitoring and limits

Set onlyChanges: true and a stateStoreName such as hn-monitor-state. First run emits NEW; later runs skip unchanged records and emit UPDATED for changes. Use a distinct store for each monitor, and do not overlap runs sharing the same state. State retains up to 10,000 recent fingerprints; evicted records can appear NEW again. No deletions are inferred from incomplete pages. Only successfully delivered results update state.

maxResults caps delivered rows; unchanged rows can still require source requests. maxPages, source list limits, maxRequests (up to 300), a 240-second processing deadline, and a 40 MB download budget bound work. RUN_REPORT shows counts, errors, unchanged skips and truncation warnings. PARTIAL means some sources failed; successful empty searches and unchanged monitors can return zero rows. Access restrictions and rate limits are reported, not bypassed.

This Actor only reads public data. It does not install packages, execute external code, send customer messages or create schedules. You can save an Apify Task and schedule it yourself. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the source platform.

عربي

أدخل المصادر أو الكلمات المطلوبة، وحدد عدد النتائج وحد الصرف. تحصل على بيانات فعلية قابلة للتصدير. خيار «التغييرات فقط» يقارن بالتشغيل السابق ضمن سجل تسميه أنت. المعلومات غير المتاحة تبقى فارغة؛ ما نختلق بيانات. لا يوجد ضمان دخل أو نتائج بحث شاملة.