Hacker News Scraper – Stories, Search & Who Is Hiring

Get Hacker News as clean JSON in three ways:

• Feeds: the front page (top), new, best, Ask HN, Show HN and YC job lists, with rank, points and comment counts.
• Search: stories or comments by keyword, newest first or best match, with points and date filters.
• Who Is Hiring: every job post from the monthly "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread, parsed into company, role, location, remote/onsite/hybrid, employment type, salary, visa sponsorship, tech stack and apply link.

Turn on Only new items and schedule it for keyword alerts or a monthly jobs feed that never charges you twice.

What data can I get?

Field	Example
type	story, job, poll, comment or hiring
title, url, domain	Show HN: Bodily Oddities, the linked page, example.com
points, commentsCount, author, createdAt	72, 31, HN username, ISO time
feed, rank	top, 3 (position on the list when scraped)
storyId, storyTitle, parentId	for comments and hiring posts: the thread they belong to
company, role, location	Modash.io, Senior Product Engineer, Remote (Europe)
remote, onsite, hybrid	true, false, false (all null when the post doesn't say)
employmentType, salary, visaSponsorship	Full-time, €75k–110k, null
technologies, applyUrl	["Python", "Rust"], the careers link from the post
headline, text	first line and full text of the post as plain text
comments	with Include comments: the thread as {id, parentId, depth, author, text, createdAt}
hnUrl	link to the item on news.ycombinator.com

Every row has the same columns. Fields that don't apply to a row type are null.

How much does it cost?

$1 per 1,000 rows. Include comments adds $1 per 1,000 stories that have comments. You pay only for rows delivered. The full Who Is Hiring thread for one month (~250–400 posts) costs about $0.25–0.40.

How do I use it?

Front page right now:

{ "mode": "feed", "feeds": ["top"], "maxItems": 30 }

Every comment that mentions your product, newest first, as a scheduled alert:

{ "mode": "search", "search": "yourproduct.com", "searchIn": "comments", "sort": "date", "onlyNew": true }

Remote Rust and Elixir jobs from the last three hiring threads:

{ "mode": "hiring", "hiringMonths": 3, "remoteOnly": true, "keywords": ["rust", "elixir"] }

How good is the Who Is Hiring parsing?

The thread asks posters to start with Company | Role | Location | REMOTE/ONSITE | ..., and most do, loosely. On the September 2026 thread (257 posts), company came out on 94% of posts, location and work mode on 89%, a link on 86% and a role on 70%. Salary shows up on the 28% of posts that list one. Posts that ignore the format get null fields rather than guesses. headline and text always carry the post exactly as written, so nothing is lost.

Use cases

• Job seekers and job boards: a monthly, structured feed of startup jobs with salary and stack.
• Recruiters and sales: companies hiring engineers right now, with their stack and careers page.
• Brand and launch monitoring: new comments or stories that mention your product, company or domain.
• Research and newsletters: top stories with points and comment counts, or a topic's history by date.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? The official Hacker News API (Firebase) for feeds and items, and Algolia's public HN Search API for search, hiring threads and comment trees. No login and no HTML scraping. Posts belong to their authors: if you show them elsewhere, link each one back to its hnUrl.

What about personal data? Usernames are the public HN handles shown next to each post. The "Who wants to be hired?" and "Seeking freelancer" threads, where people post their CVs, are left out of every mode.

Why does best-match search stop at 1,000? Algolia returns at most 1,000 results per query in relevance order. Sort by Newest first to page back through everything.

Do I need a proxy? No. It runs at 256 MB without a proxy.

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