Hacker News Scraper
Pricing
from $0.40 / 1,000 data fetcheds
Scrapes Hacker News stories, comments, jobs, polls, and user profiles via the official Firebase and Algolia APIs. Supports full-text search, Who's Hiring thread extraction, author karma snapshots, and deep comment trees.
What to scrape. 'topstories' / 'newstories' / 'beststories' pull from the official Firebase lists. 'askstories' / 'showstories' / 'jobstories' return only Ask HN / Show HN / jobs. 'search' runs a full-text Algolia query. 'user' returns everything a username has submitted. 'hiring_threads' auto-detects the latest monthly 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?' post and returns its top-level job comments.
Maximum number of top-level items to return (stories for list/search/user modes, comments for hiring mode). Firebase list endpoints cap at 500; Algolia search caps at 1000 per page but can paginate further.
If enabled, each story's full comment tree is fetched and attached under the comments field (respecting maxCommentDepth). Adds latency and per-comment billing.
Maximum nesting depth when expanding comment trees. 1 = top-level replies only, 10 = deepest practical threads. Ignored when includeComments is off.
If enabled, comments are returned as a flat array (with a depth field) instead of a nested tree. Useful for spreadsheet-friendly output.
Skip stories with fewer points than this. 0 = no filter. Example: set to 100 to only get front-page-worthy stories.
Skip stories with fewer comments (descendants) than this. 0 = no filter. Useful for filtering to heavily-discussed threads.
Only return items created after this Unix timestamp (seconds since epoch). Leave empty for no lower bound. Example: 1735689600 = 2025-01-01.
Only return items created before this Unix timestamp (seconds since epoch). Leave empty for no upper bound.
If set, only stories whose URL domain matches one of these are returned. Example: ["github.com", "arxiv.org"] for tech-focused scraping.
[]Full-text search query. Required when mode is 'search'. Example: "Claude" or "GPT-5 launch".
Restrict search results by type. Options: 'story', 'comment', 'poll', 'job'. You can also pass 'author_' or 'story_' (advanced). Ignored outside search mode.
[]Sort Algolia search results by relevance (best match first) or by date (newest first).
HN username whose submissions to fetch. Required when mode is 'user'. Case-sensitive. Example: "dang".