Show HN Scraper — Hacker News AI Launches & New Tools

Scrape Show HN posts from Hacker News: every launch with its title, product URL, HN discussion link, points, comment count and date. The default input is preset for AI launches (AI, LLM, GPT, MCP, agents, Claude, RAG and more), but you can track any topic by changing the keywords, or switch the tags to story or ask_hn. It uses the official Algolia Hacker News Search API: no key, no login, no browser.

What does this Show HN scraper do?

It runs one Algolia HN search per keyword, keeps only whole-word matches (so "AI" does not match "said"), merges and de-duplicates the stories and returns them newest first. Filter by postedAfter and minPoints to keep only launches that got traction. Usernames are left out by default.

Why use it?

• Official Algolia HN API — free, no key, no scraping
• Filter by date, points and custom query
• Ideal input for newsletters, directories and competitor intel agents
• Fail-loudly empty-result guard

Data source

Algolia HN Search API https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date (public, undocumented-but-stable HN community API).

Input

• keywords: Keywords (merged, de-duplicated)
• query: Optional single query override
• tags: HN tags (default show_hn)
• postedAfter: YYYY-MM-DD
• minPoints: Minimum score
• maxItems: Cap

Example input:

{
  "keywords": [
    "AI",
    "agent",
    "MCP"
  ],
  "postedAfter": "2026-10-01",
  "minPoints": 5,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Output

Each dataset item looks like this:

{
  "title": "Show HN: An AI agent that books meetings",
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "hn_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1",
  "points": 42,
  "num_comments": 18
}

Export as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or pull via the Apify API, webhooks, Make, Zapier, n8n or the Apify MCP server.

How much does it cost?

Pay per event: $0.001 per run + $0.0015 per result (≈ $1.50 per 1,000 results). You are never charged for results on a failed run: if no data is found, the run fails loudly with an explanation instead of returning an empty "success".

Use cases

• AI newsletter curators
• Directory operators sourcing new tools
• VCs tracking AI launches
• Agents that auto-summarize new Show HN AI posts

Scheduling & monitoring

Schedule it daily or weekly in Apify Console and connect a webhook/Slack/email integration to get new items automatically.

FAQ

Is this legal? It uses the public Algolia HN Search API. Story content is public HN data.. No personal data is collected.

Something broke? Open an issue on the Issues tab; the actor is tested daily.

Tips

Tip: a daily launch feed. Schedule a daily run with postedAfter set to yesterday and connect Slack, email or a webhook, and you get every new AI launch on Hacker News in one digest. Re-running over the same window shows how points and comments grew.

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