Hacker News Jobs Scraper: Who Is Hiring?

Scrape job posts from Hacker News's monthly "Who is hiring?" threads — thousands of startup and tech job listings posted straight by hiring companies — through the free, public, official Algolia HN Search API. No login, no browser, no API key.

What you can do with it

• Pull the latest hiring thread in one run. Every top-level comment under the newest "Who is hiring?" thread, as a clean dataset instead of scrolling hundreds of comments by hand.
• Build a historical archive. Go back monthsBack threads to compare postings month over month, or backfill a job board.
• Feed a search or alert tool. textPlain and headline are ready for full-text search or keyword matching (e.g. "remote", "Rust", "visa sponsorship").
• Track a company's hiring activity over time. author, threadMonth and createdAt let you group posts by poster and month across runs.

Input

Field	What it does
monthsBack	How many of the most recent "Who is hiring?" threads to read, newest first. 1 (default) means the latest thread only.
maxItems	The run stops once this many job posts are saved (default 50).

Example input:

{
  "monthsBack": 1,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Output

One record per top-level comment (one job post):

{
  "id": 49922584,
  "threadId": 49922569,
  "threadMonth": "October 2026",
  "headline": "PrairieLearn (Remote US) — Full-Stack Software Engineer — TypeScript / Postgres / React / AI",
  "author": "mwest1066",
  "text": "PrairieLearn (Remote US) — Full-Stack Software Engineer — TypeScript / Postgres / React / AI\n\nPrairieLearn (https://www.prairielearn.com) is an open-source assessment platform used by universities across the US...",
  "textPlain": "PrairieLearn (Remote US) — Full-Stack Software Engineer — TypeScript / Postgres / React / AI PrairieLearn (https://www.prairielearn.com) is an open-source assessment platform used by universities across the US...",
  "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922584",
  "createdAt": "2026-10-01T15:02:37.000Z"
}

Export the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it through the Apify API.

Why this one

• Covers every post, not a sample. Every top-level comment of the thread is read, in one API call per thread.
• Always the freshest thread by default. monthsBack: 1 always resolves to whichever month's thread is currently live, no hardcoded ID to update.
• Free, no key, no browser. Built on the same public Algolia HN Search API HN's own search page uses — no proxy or anti-bot cost to pass on.

Good to know

• There is no structured job schema on Hacker News: posters write free text. headline (the comment's first line) is a best-effort guess at the "Company | Location | Role" convention many posters follow, but it is not enforced by HN, so text/textPlain remain the source of truth — nothing is force-split into separate company/role/location fields.
• text keeps the original paragraph breaks; textPlain is the same content flattened to a single line for CSV or search indexing.
• Every e-mail address and phone-like number found in a post is replaced by [removed], including a recruiter's or company's own contact address. The dataset never carries a reachable contact; apply through the link the poster included (text/textPlain) instead.
• Replies to a job post (second-level comments and deeper) are not included — only the top-level post from the hiring company.
• This is an unofficial tool, not affiliated with Hacker News or Y Combinator. It reads the same public Algolia HN Search API (hn.algolia.com) that powers HN's own search.

FAQ

Does it need a browser or a proxy? No. The Actor reads the public Algolia HN Search API directly.

Does it work without any filter? Yes. With no input at all it saves up to 50 job posts from the latest "Who is hiring?" thread.

Can I get data from several months at once? Yes, set monthsBack to however many threads back you want to cover, and raise maxItems accordingly.

Try it

Open hackernews-jobs-scraper on the Apify Store