Hacker News Scraper — Stories, Comments, Ask/Show HN by Keyword

Search and export Hacker News content as clean structured data. Give it any keyword and get back stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN and polls with points, author, comment counts, URLs and timestamps — ready for JSON, CSV, Excel, Google Sheets or your database.

Built on Hacker News' official public search API, so it is fast, stable and needs no login, no API key and no proxy.

🔍 What you can do

• Track every mention of a product, company, competitor or topic on Hacker News
• Pull the front page on a schedule for a news/monitoring dashboard
• Collect Ask HN / Show HN threads for product and market research
• Export top comments for sentiment and community analysis
• Feed Hacker News discussions into an LLM / RAG pipeline

⚙️ Input

{
  "queries": ["openai", "rust"],
  "searchType": "story",
  "sortBy": "relevance",
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 100,
  "minPoints": 50
}

Field	Description
queries	Keywords to search. Empty → current front page.
searchType	story, comment, ask_hn, show_hn, poll or front_page.
sortBy	relevance or date (newest first).
maxItemsPerQuery	1–1000 items per query.
minPoints	Only items with at least this many points.

📤 Output (one item per result)

{
  "objectID": "38765432",
  "type": "story",
  "title": "Show HN: I built …",
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "author": "pg",
  "points": 512,
  "num_comments": 231,
  "text": null,
  "created_at": "2026-01-04T12:00:00.000Z",
  "hn_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38765432",
  "query": "openai"
}

❓ FAQ

Do I need a Hacker News or Algolia account? No. This Actor uses the free public Hacker News search API — no key, no login.

How fresh is the data? Real time. sortBy: "date" returns items the moment they are indexed.

Can I get every comment on a thread? Use searchType: "comment" with the thread keyword, or search by the story author. Very large threads are paginated automatically up to your item cap.

How do I run it on a schedule? Use the built-in Apify Scheduler or call the run-sync API endpoint from Make, Zapier, n8n or your own code.

⚖️ Disclaimer

Not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News. Reads only publicly available data via the official public API. You are responsible for how you use the data.

🔌 Integrations

Works with the Apify API, Scheduler, webhooks, Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets and Slack.