Hacker News Who is Hiring Scraper

This Actor extracts job postings from the monthly Hacker News hiring threads hosted on Y Combinator:

• Ask HN: Who is hiring? (Full-time roles at startups and tech companies)
• Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (Contracts, freelance projects, and consultants)
• Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (Candidate profiles looking for work)

Instead of manually scrolling through hundreds of unformatted comments, this Actor queries the official Hacker News Firebase API, parses the comment headers, and normalizes the text into clean, searchable records.

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Features

• Header Parsing: Automatically splits comments into structured fields: company name, role, location, remote eligibility, and employment type.
• Direct Contact Extraction: Extracts hiring email addresses and application URLs directly from post descriptions.
• Tech Stack Detection: Identifies mentioned technologies (e.g. Python, TypeScript, Rust, Go, Kubernetes, React, AWS, PyTorch) and tags them as an array.
• Filtering Options: Filter postings by keyword, technology, location, or remote-only before saving to the dataset.
• Lightweight & Fast: Uses the public Hacker News Firebase API. Runs in seconds without browser automation or proxies.

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Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
thread_type	String	"whoishiring"	Target thread: whoishiring, freelance, or seeking.
remote_only	Boolean	false	When true, only returns roles mentioning remote work.
keyword_filter	String	null	Keyword to search across role, company, or description.
location_filter	String	null	Filter by geographic location (e.g. Europe, US, London).
max_items	Integer	150	Maximum number of top-level postings to inspect.
custom_thread_id	Integer	null	Optional specific Hacker News item ID to scrape.

Example Input

{
  "thread_type": "whoishiring",
  "remote_only": true,
  "keyword_filter": "Python",
  "max_items": 100
}

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Sample Output

{
  "id": "hn_49929056",
  "company": "GiveDirectly",
  "role": "Senior Software Engineer",
  "location": "REMOTE in select countries",
  "is_remote": true,
  "employment_type": "Full-time",
  "salary": "$140k - $175k",
  "tech_stack": [
    "Python",
    "PostgreSQL",
    "AWS",
    "Docker"
  ],
  "contact_email": "jobs@givedirectly.org",
  "application_url": "https://www.givedirectly.org/careers",
  "author": "gd_recruiting",
  "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929056",
  "thread_title": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)",
  "date_posted": "2026-10-01T15:24:00.000Z",
  "description_text": "GiveDirectly | Senior Software Engineer | REMOTE in select countries...",
  "scraped_at": "2026-10-12T08:00:00.000Z"
}

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Common Uses

• Sourcing startup jobs and early-stage opportunities not listed on standard job boards.
• Finding freelance contracts directly from founders and engineering leads.
• Gathering market intelligence on startup compensation, tech stack adoption, and hiring trends.

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Performance

This Actor makes concurrent REST calls to the Hacker News Firebase API (hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0). Because the API is public and lightweight, runs complete quickly without proxy requirements.