Hacker News Scraper — search, feeds, comments & "Who is hiring?" in one Actor

Pull anything from Hacker News as clean JSON: full-text search of stories and comments (by keyword, author, date, points), the front page / newest / Ask HN / Show HN / jobs feeds, all comments of a story, and — unique to this Actor — the monthly "Who is hiring?" / "Who wants to be hired?" / "Freelancer?" threads parsed into structured job postings.

Uses the official HN Algolia API: no login, no proxies, no scraping of HN pages, so it doesn't break.

What people use it for

• Developer sentiment & market research — every HN comment mentioning your product, competitor or technology, with dates and points.
• Content & newsletter curation — front page or Show HN, filtered by keyword, delivered daily to Slack/Sheets.
• Launch monitoring — get pinged when a story matching your keywords hits the front page.
• Job hunting / sourcing — the "Who is hiring?" thread as a filterable table (remote, visa, salary, tech stack, apply links), or "Who wants to be hired?" as a candidate list.
• AI agents — "what is HN saying about Postgres this week?" answered in one tool call via the Apify MCP server.

Sample output

Search / feed item (story):

{
  "id": "22238335",
  "type": "story",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22238335",
  "author": "Sikul",
  "createdAt": "2020-02-04T17:30:40Z",
  "points": 1582,
  "title": "Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust",
  "url": "https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to-rust-a190bbca2b1f",
  "text": "",
  "numComments": 642,
  "isAskHn": false, "isShowHn": false, "isFrontPage": false
}

Comment:

{
  "id": "49826817",
  "type": "comment",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49826817",
  "author": "Frieren",
  "createdAt": "2026-09-24T06:09:04Z",
  "text": "> To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly ...",
  "storyId": 49817741,
  "parentId": 49817741,
  "storyTitle": "Why 'What's Opera, Doc?' looks like that",
  "storyUrl": "https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/..."
}

"Who is hiring?" posting:

{
  "id": "hn:49711313",
  "type": "posting",
  "thread": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2026)",
  "company": "Pango",
  "headline": "Pango (YC S26) | Founding Software Engineer | On-site (hybrid) in Stockholm, Sweden | Full time",
  "roles": ["Founding Software Engineer"],
  "locations": ["On-site (hybrid) in Stockholm, Sweden"],
  "remote": false, "onsite": true, "visaSponsorship": false, "internships": false,
  "salaryMentions": [],
  "tech": ["rust", "golang"],
  "urls": [],
  "emails": ["steve@pango.ai"],
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49711313",
  "text": "Pango (YC S26) | Founding Software Engineer | ..."
}

Pricing

$1.00 per 1,000 items (stories, comments, feed entries or parsed postings — one flat price). Reading a whole "Who is hiring?" month (~400 postings) is about $0.40; a daily keyword monitor usually costs a fraction of a cent. Free-plan users get up to 100 items per run.

Modes

Mode	What it does	Key inputs
search	Full-text search of stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs or polls	query, kind, sort, author, storyId (all comments of a story), dateFrom/To, minPoints, minComments
feed	Front page, newest, Ask HN, Show HN, job posts, top comments	feed, dateFrom/To
whoIsHiring	Monthly hiring / wants-to-be-hired / freelancer threads → structured postings	threadType, months, remoteOnly, visaOnly

keywords / excludeKeywords post-filter every mode; onlyNewSinceLastRun turns any mode into a monitor for scheduled runs (you only get — and pay for — new items).

Tips

• Monitor your brand: search, kind: comment, keywords: ["yourproduct"], onlyNewSinceLastRun: true, run hourly.
• Weekly digest: feed: front_page, dateFrom = 7 days ago, push to Google Sheets or Slack.
• Candidates: whoIsHiring + threadType: wants_to_be_hired + keywords: ["react", "remote"].
• Combine with the Apify MCP server so your agent can query HN directly.

See also

• Remote Jobs Aggregator — 6 remote job boards in one deduplicated feed with job-alert monitor mode.
• Y Combinator Companies & Jobs — every open role at YC startups with salary, equity and founders.