Hacker News Stories Scraper

Scrape Hacker News stories directly via the official Firebase API. Extract titles, URLs, points, authors, comment counts, timestamps, and story types for developer trend tracking and tech community monitoring.

Overview

This actor uses the official Hacker News API to fetch stories efficiently without web scraping. It supports all story types including top, new, best, ask, show, and job stories. The API-based approach ensures reliable data extraction with no risk of being blocked.

Features

• Fetch stories from all Hacker News categories (top, new, best, ask, show, job)
• Filter stories by minimum point threshold
• Direct API access for maximum reliability and speed
• Batch processing for efficient data retrieval
• Extract story metadata including points, comments, author, and timestamp
• No browser or HTML parsing required
• Works with empty input using sensible defaults

Input Configuration

Field	Type	Description	Default
storyType	String	Type of stories to fetch (top, new, best, ask, show, job)	"top"
maxStories	Integer	Maximum stories to fetch	200
minPoints	Integer	Minimum points threshold for inclusion	10

Output Data

Each story includes the following fields:

• id - Hacker News item ID
• title - Story title
• storyUrl - External URL the story links to
• points - Upvote count (score)
• author - Username of submitter
• commentCount - Number of comments (descendants)
• timePosted - ISO 8601 submission timestamp
• type - Item type (story, job, poll)
• hnUrl - Direct link to Hacker News discussion page
• dataSource - Data source identifier
• apiEndpoint - API endpoint used for this item
• scrapedAt - Timestamp of data extraction

Use Cases

This scraper is ideal for developer trend tracking, tech community analysis, content curation, competitive intelligence, and research into technology adoption patterns. Developers, marketers, and analysts use this data to identify trending topics, popular tools, and emerging technologies.

API Integration

You can call this actor via the Apify API to integrate Hacker News data into your dashboards, newsletters, or content recommendation systems. Results are available in JSON, CSV, XML, and other formats via the dataset API endpoint.

Cost Estimation

With pay-per-event pricing at $0.30 per 1,000 results, fetching 200 top stories costs approximately $0.06. The actor is extremely efficient since it uses direct API calls instead of browser-based scraping, requiring only 256MB minimum memory.