Hacker News Scraper: Top Stories, Show HN & Hiring Leads

Extract Hacker News front page top stories, breakout "Show HN" products, community "Ask HN" discussions, monthly "Who Is Hiring" tech job leads, and custom keyword searches.

Fast, reliable, structured JSON output, zero login or API keys required. Designed for developers, founders, AI Agents (Model Context Protocol / MCP), recruiters, and market intelligence researchers.

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Features

• Front Page & Top Stories: Track what the global tech community is discussing in real-time.
• Show HN Launches: Discover breakthrough startup products, developer tools, and open-source projects.
• Ask HN Discussions: Monitor engineering advice, industry questions, and technical debates.
• Monthly "Who Is Hiring" Leads: Automatically extracts remote tech job openings, salaries, and company postings from official YC hiring threads.
• Custom Keyword Search: Query historical and current Hacker News archives by keyword (e.g. LLM, Agent, PostgreSQL, YC).
• Flexible Sorting: Rank results by Popularity (Points/Comments) or Date (Newest first).
• Clean Text Formatting: Strips HTML clutter into readable plain text while retaining links.

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Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
mode	Select	"top"	Feed mode: top (Front page), new, show_hn, ask_hn, who_is_hiring, or custom_query.
query	String	"ai agent"	Search keyword when using custom_query or to filter stories.
sortBy	Select	"popularity"	Ranking strategy: popularity (Upvotes & comments) or date (Newest first).
maxResults	Integer	20	Maximum number of items to return (1 to 200).

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Sample JSON Output

[
  {
    "id": "50242939",
    "title": "Anthropic S-1",
    "author": "simonw",
    "authorProfileUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw",
    "points": 1523,
    "commentsCount": 1486,
    "url": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026067168/anthropicpbc-sx1.htm",
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50242939",
    "storyText": "",
    "category": "top",
    "createdAt": "2026-10-26T18:30:12Z",
    "createdTimestamp": 1793041812
  },
  {
    "id": "50192873",
    "title": "Stripe | Full-Stack & Systems Engineers | Seattle / SF / Remote",
    "author": "patrickc",
    "authorProfileUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patrickc",
    "points": 12,
    "commentsCount": 0,
    "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50192873",
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50192873",
    "storyText": "Stripe is hiring senior engineers to scale our financial infrastructure globally. Fully remote in US/Canada/EU. Tech stack: Ruby, Go, Java, React.",
    "category": "who_is_hiring",
    "createdAt": "2026-10-02T16:20:00Z",
    "createdTimestamp": 1792947600
  }
]

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Integration with AI Agents & MCP

This Actor outputs clean structured datasets ready for direct consumption by AI Agents, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or AutoGPT via Apify's Model Context Protocol (MCP) server (apify-default-dataset-item).