Hacker News Scraper: Stories, Comments, Search & Who Is Hiring Jobs

Get clean, structured data from Hacker News in seconds. One Actor covers everything people usually need from HN:

• Story feeds: front page (top), new, best, Ask HN, Show HN and YC job posts, in live ranking order.
• Full-text search over 20 years of stories and comments, with date range, minimum points and minimum comments filters. Sort by relevance or newest first (no 1,000-result limit when sorting by date).
• Complete comment threads for any story, flattened in thread order with depth, parentId and storyId, so you can rebuild the tree or feed it to an LLM.
• "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" jobs, parsed: company, role, location, remote / hybrid / onsite, salary, employment type, tech stack, visa sponsorship and links for every post of any month since 2011.

It uses the official Hacker News APIs (Firebase and Algolia HN Search). No login, no proxies, no browser, so runs are fast and cheap.

Pricing: from $0.15 per 1,000 items

	This Actor	Typical HN scrapers on Apify
Stories and comments	$0.15 per 1,000	$0.20 to $5.00 per 1,000
Parsed Who is hiring jobs	$1.00 per 1,000	$2.00 to $3.50 per 1,000
Actor start	$0.0005	$0.00005 to $0.001

You pay only for rows you receive. Set Max items to cap a run, and Apify's maximum cost per run is respected exactly.

Use cases

• Trend and brand monitoring: schedule a daily search for your product, competitors or a technology, newest first, and send results to Slack, Google Sheets or a webhook.
• Developer sentiment and research: pull every comment on a launch or a topic and analyze it with an LLM.
• Recruiting and job search: get the monthly Who is hiring? thread as a spreadsheet, filtered to remote Python or Rust roles with salaries.
• Content and newsletters: collect the best Show HN or front-page stories of the week.
• AI agents and RAG: clean plain text (HTML removed, links kept as full URLs).

Input examples

Front page right now:

{ "mode": "feed", "feed": "top", "maxItems": 30 }

Every story mentioning "web scraping" in the last 30 days with 10+ points, plus their comments:

{ "mode": "search", "searchQuery": "web scraping", "sortBy": "date", "postedAfter": "30 days", "minPoints": 10, "includeComments": true, "maxItems": 500 }

All comments of a story:

{ "mode": "comments", "storyUrls": ["https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863"], "maxItems": 1000 }

Remote Python jobs from the latest Who is hiring? thread:

{ "mode": "whoIsHiring", "hiringMonth": "latest", "jobKeywords": ["python"], "remoteOnly": true, "maxItems": 500 }

Output

Story row:

{
  "type": "story", "id": 8863, "title": "My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive", "url": "http://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/screencast.html",
  "domain": "getdropbox.com", "author": "dhouston", "points": 104, "commentsCount": 71, "createdAt": "2007-04-04T19:16:40.000Z",
  "text": null, "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863", "feed": "top", "rank": 1
}

Comment row: type, id, author, createdAt, text, parentId, storyId, storyTitle, depth, hnUrl.

Job row (Who is hiring):

{
  "type": "job", "company": "Sidekick Labs", "role": "Senior SWE, R&D Engineer, Intelligence Engineer", "location": "REMOTE (US Timezones)",
  "remote": true, "workplace": "remote", "salary": "$170k to $230k", "employmentType": ["full-time"], "techStack": [],
  "visaSponsorship": null, "links": ["https://..."], "month": "October 2026", "header": "Sidekick Labs | Senior SWE, ...", "text": "...full post..."
}

Job fields are parsed from the free-form first line that HN posters write, so they are best-effort; the original header and full text are always included.

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape Hacker News? This Actor reads the public, official Hacker News APIs that Y Combinator and Algolia provide for exactly this kind of use, and it does not log in or bypass anything. Respect the usual rules when you reuse people's posts.

How far back does search go? To the start of Hacker News in 2007. Relevance search returns the top 1,000 matches per query; choose "Newest first" to page through everything.

Why do I get fewer rows than Max items? The feed lists hold up to 500 stories, deleted and dead items are skipped, and filters may match fewer items.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes. Use Apify Schedules with a newest-first search and a "Posted after: 24 hours" filter for a daily digest.

Can I call it from code or an AI agent? Yes, through the Apify API, the Python and JavaScript clients, or the Apify MCP server:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/best_apis~hacker-news-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"mode":"search","searchQuery":"llm agents","sortBy":"date","maxItems":50}'

Questions or a field you need? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab and I'll usually answer within a day.