Hacker News Scraper — stories, comments, jobs, Who is hiring

Scrape Hacker News into a clean dataset: the front page, newest, best, Ask HN, Show HN and job listings; full-text search with date and points filters; comment threads (depth-limited); and the monthly "Who is hiring?" thread parsed into structured job rows (company, role, location, remote/onsite/hybrid, salary, links, contact e-mails). Uses HN's official Firebase API and the Algolia HN search API — no login, no browser, no proxies, fast and cheap.

Typical uses: tech-news monitoring and digests, brand/competitor/keyword alerts (e.g. every story mentioning your product), research datasets and LLM inputs, job boards and recruiting leads from "Who is hiring?", Show HN launch tracking, sentiment analysis on comments.

What you get

Stories (type: "story", modes top/new/best/ask/show/jobs/search):

field	description
id, rank, kind	HN item id, position in the list, story / ask / show / job / poll
title, url, domain, text	Link and (for Ask/Show/Jobs) the post body as plain text
author, points, num_comments, created_at	Metadata (UTC ISO timestamp)
hn_url	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…

Comments (type: "comment", with includeComments or searchTags: comment): id, story_id, story_title, story_url, parent_id, depth, author, created_at, text (plain text, HTML entities decoded), hn_url.

Jobs (type: "job", mode whoishiring): company, role, location, remote, onsite, hybrid, visa, interns, salary (first salary range found, e.g. $170-240K), urls, emails, header (the post's first line), header_parts (the first line split on |), text (full plain text), thread_title, month, author, created_at, hn_url.

Candidates (type: "candidate", thread "Who wants to be hired?"): location, remote, willing_to_relocate, technologies, resume, email, header_parts, urls, emails, text.

Problems (bad mode, no matching thread, API errors) produce a type: "error" row — free.

Export as JSON, CSV or Excel, or push rows to Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, webhooks or your code through the Apify API.

Input

field	default	meaning
mode	top	top, new, best, ask, show, jobs, search, whoishiring
query	—	search text (mode search)
searchTags	story	Algolia tags: story, comment, poll, show_hn, ask_hn, front_page, job, author_pg, story_8863; , = AND, (a,b) = OR
sortBy	relevance	relevance or date
dateFrom, dateTo	—	search window, YYYY-MM-DD (UTC)
minPoints	0	search: minimum upvotes
maxItems	100	max story/job rows (lists: up to 500; search: up to 5,000)
includeComments	false	add comment rows per story
commentDepth	1	1 = top-level only, 2 = plus replies, …
maxCommentsPerStory	100	cap per story
hiringThread	who-is-hiring	who-is-hiring, who-wants-to-be-hired, freelancer
hiringMonth	latest	YYYY-MM to pick an older thread

Examples:

{ "mode": "whoishiring", "maxItems": 1000 }

{ "mode": "search", "query": "postgres", "sortBy": "date", "dateFrom": "2026-08-01", "minPoints": 50, "maxItems": 200, "includeComments": true, "commentDepth": 1, "maxCommentsPerStory": 20 }

Schedule the actor (hourly for new/search, monthly for whoishiring) and deduplicate on id to build a continuous monitor.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.0002 per stored row ($0.20 per 1,000 stories, comments or jobs). Error rows are free. Apify platform usage (a few seconds of compute per run) is billed separately by Apify.

Limitations — please read

• List modes (top, new, …) return at most the 500 items HN publishes; story metadata comes from Algolia's index (with a per-item Firebase fallback), so points/num_comments can lag HN by a few minutes.
• Comments are loaded from Algolia in one call per story (up to 5,000 per story); depth is computed from the parent chain. Deleted/empty comments are skipped.
• "Who is hiring?" parsing follows the community convention Company | Role | Location | … on the first line. Posts that ignore the convention still get header, header_parts, text, urls and emails, but company/role/location may be off. remote/onsite/hybrid are keyword flags, not verified facts. Candidate posts are even less uniform — treat those fields as best-effort.
• Search is limited by Algolia to 50 pages × 100 hits.

Not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News. Public data only; respect people's contact preferences when using e-mails from posts.