Hacker News Scraper — Stories & Comments by Keyword

Search Hacker News stories and comments by keyword: Show HN, Ask HN, polls and job posts too, with points, comment count, author, link and date. Filter by minimum points and time window, newest first or by relevance. No login. $0.10 per 1,000 items.

Search Hacker News by keyword and get clean rows of stories and comments, with points, comment count, author, link and date, from the public Algolia HN Search API that Hacker News itself links to. No login, no API key, no browser.

• Item types: stories, comments, Show HN, Ask HN, polls and job posts, alone or combined.
• Minimum points to keep only stories that took off, and a time window from one hour to a year.
• Newest first for monitoring, or most relevant for research ("what did HN say about X?").
• Comments carry the title of the story they were posted on; stories carry their outbound link and a Show HN / Ask HN label.

Use it to track launches and mentions of your product or competitors, collect Show HN launches in a niche, research developer opinion on a library, or build a dataset of top stories. Schedule it with Only new since last run and pipe new items to Slack, Sheets, n8n or Zapier.

$0.10 per 1,000 items. Searches with no matches return a free status row.

What data does it return?

Every run outputs clean, schema-validated rows like these:

createdAt	contentType	channel	title	score	replyCount	authorHandle	url
2026-10-21T16:44:53.000Z	story	Show HN	Show HN: Omnara – Open-source alternative to Claude Managed Agents	111	34	kmansm27	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50183892
2026-10-19T13:07:07.000Z	story	Show HN	Show HN: I built a task system to handle the drudgery so I could focus on tasks	61	54	dmayle	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151980
2026-10-16T15:55:40.000Z	story		Postgres 19 delayed after AI reviewers find more bugs than humans can fix	227	93	magoghm	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50119991
2026-10-12T06:36:53.000Z	story		Postgres isn't slow, your storage is	180	187	saisrirampur	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052163

How much does it cost?

Transparent pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for what you get, and the actor always respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and it stops cleanly at the cap instead of overrunning.

Event	Price	Charged	Worked example
hn-item	$0.0001	per Hacker News story or comment row	1,000 items = $0.10
apify-actor-start	$0.00005	per run per GB of memory (platform start fee)	One run at 256 MB = $0.00005

Input options

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
keywords	array	yes	—	Words or phrases to search Hacker News for: a product, library, company, domain or topic, e.g. "supabase", "rust async" or "stripe.com". Titles, story text, URLs and comments are searched (Algolia HN Search).
hnTypes	array	no	[]	Which Hacker News items to return: stories, comments, Show HN, Ask HN, polls or job posts (any of them). Empty = stories, plus comments when "Include comments" is on.
includeComments	boolean	no	true	When no item types are picked: also return comments, not only stories.
hnMinPoints	integer	no	—	Only items with at least this many points (upvotes). Comments have no public points, so setting this returns stories only.
hnSort	string	no	"date"	Newest first, or Hacker News search relevance (best text matches and popular items first).
sinceHours	integer	no	720	Only items created in the last N hours: 24 = one day, 168 = one week, 720 = 30 days, up to 8,760 (one year).
maxPosts	integer	no	100	Stop after this many items in total (shared fairly between queries). Each item is one charged row.
excludeKeywords	array	no	—	Drop items whose title or text contains any of these words or phrases (whole words, case-insensitive), e.g. "hiring".
newSinceLastRun	boolean	no	false	For scheduled runs: skip items already delivered by an earlier run with the same queries and filters, so you only get (and pay for) new ones. Only hashed item IDs are kept.

Limits & honest notes

• Hacker News only, through the public Algolia HN Search API (hn.algolia.com), paced at 2 requests per second. For the same search across Bluesky, Lemmy, Mastodon, GitHub and DEV, use Brand Mentions Monitor.
• Search is Algolia full-text search with its own typo tolerance, so a short query can also match similar words. Use "Exclude keywords" or a longer phrase to narrow it.
• Comment and story text is plain text, cut at 1,000 characters (textTruncated says when). Points are public for stories only.
• Public data only: author handles as shown on Hacker News, no e-mail addresses or profiles. Items deleted on HN disappear from the index.
• Respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and the run stops cleanly at the cap. No matches, bad input or an API outage give a free status row.

Related ActorForge actors

• Brand Mentions Monitor — Hacker News plus Bluesky, Lemmy, Mastodon, GitHub and DEV in one run
• Bluesky Posts Search — the same search on Bluesky

Changelog

• 2026-10-23 — Initial release: Hacker News-only listing with item types (Show HN, Ask HN, polls, jobs), minimum points and relevance sort, $0.10 per 1,000 items.

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Built and maintained by ActorForge. Reliability first: every actor in the portfolio is monitored by an automated nightly self-test, and breakages are typically fixed the same day.