Hacker News Search & Monitor

Search and export Hacker News stories, comments, and Ask/Show HN by keyword, author, or date.

What it does

• Search all of Hacker News by keyword using the free Algolia API (no API key needed).
• Pick the item type: stories, comments, Show HN, Ask HN, or front page stories.
• Filter by minimum points, author, and a recency window in hours.
• Sort by relevance or by date (newest first).
• Export clean, flat records to a dataset plus an aggregate summary in OUTPUT.

Example input

Top stories mentioning "apify":

{
  "query": "apify",
  "tags": "story",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Newest Show HN posts from the last 48 hours with at least 5 points:

{
  "query": "",
  "tags": "show_hn",
  "minPoints": 5,
  "sinceHours": 48,
  "byDate": true,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Everything a specific author posted:

{
  "query": "",
  "tags": "story",
  "author": "pg",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Input

Field	Type	Description
query	string	Full-text search term. Leave empty to list newest or most relevant items for the chosen type.
tags	string	Item type: story, comment, show_hn, ask_hn, or front_page. Default story.
minPoints	integer	Keep only items with at least this many points. Comments usually have no points.
author	string	Keep only items by this Hacker News username. Leave empty for any author.
sinceHours	integer	Keep only items created within this many hours. 0 disables the time filter.
maxItems	integer	How many items to return (auto-paginated, max 1000).
byDate	boolean	When true, sort newest first. When false, sort by relevance.

Output

Each dataset item is one hit:

{
  "title": "Show HN: Apify SDK, a scalable web crawling library for JavaScript",
  "url": "https://github.com/apifytech/apify-js",
  "author": "jancurn",
  "points": 78,
  "numComments": 8,
  "createdAt": "2018-09-25T08:24:40Z",
  "objectID": "18064493",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18064493",
  "text": null
}

For comments and Ask HN posts, text holds the comment or question body, and title and url point at the parent story when the item is a comment.

Run summary (OUTPUT)

The run's default key-value store record OUTPUT holds an aggregate for the whole result set:

{
  "query": {
    "query": "apify",
    "tags": "story",
    "byDate": false
  },
  "itemsReturned": 20,
  "requestedMaxItems": 20,
  "scanned": 20,
  "totalPoints": 512,
  "topItem": {
    "title": "...",
    "points": 132,
    "author": "sathish316",
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058874"
  },
  "generatedFrom": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search"
}

How it works

The Actor calls the public Hacker News Algolia API. It combines your item type and author into a tag filter, applies a recency window with the created_at_i numeric filter, and paginates until it has maxItems results or runs out of matches. The points floor is applied while paging because the API does not filter on points server-side. No API key is needed.

MIT licensed.