Hacker News Scraper

Hacker News Scraper returns stories from the Hacker News front page lists (top, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN and jobs) and from full-text search, one row per story with title, link, points, comment count, submitter and time. On request it adds the whole comment thread of each story as rows with depth and parent. Click Start with the prefilled input to get the current top 100, which took 3 seconds in October 2026. One search term returns at most 1,000 stories, a limit of the search service. It costs $0.50 per 1,000 stories on the Free plan ($0.25 on Business), and the $5 of monthly credit in Apify's Free plan covers about 10,000 stories.

What data does it return?

Field	Description
id, hnUrl	Hacker News item ID and the discussion page, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024055.
title	Story title as submitted, including prefixes such as Show HN: or Ask HN:.
kind	story for a link, ask for Ask HN and Tell HN, show for Show HN, job or poll.
url, domain	The external link and its host without www, such as github.com. Both null for text posts such as most Ask HN.
text	Body of a text post or job ad as plain text, null for plain link stories.
author	The Hacker News username of the submitter.
points, commentsCount	Score and number of comments at the time of the run. Job ads have no comments, so the count is null.
createdAt	When the story was posted, ISO 8601 UTC.
source, rank	Where the story came from (top, new, best, ask, show, jobs, search or input for stories you named) and its position there, 1 being first.
matchedQuery	The search term that found the story, null for list and named stories.
commentsRead	With Include comments on, how many comments of the story the run returned, up to Maximum comments per story. commentsCount stays the total of the thread.
type, key	story or comment, and the row key such as story:50024055 that new-only mode compares.

Comment rows, returned with Include comments, have id, hnUrl, author, createdAt and text like stories, plus storyId and storyTitle of the thread, parentId (the comment it replies to, null at the top level) and depth (0 for a top-level comment, 1 for a reply and so on). They come right after their story, in the order of the thread.

How to scrape Hacker News

1. Pick front page lists in Lists and set Maximum stories per list. Top and new go to 500 stories, best to 200, Ask HN, Show HN and jobs as far as Hacker News lists them.
2. To search, add Search terms, choose What to search (stories, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs, polls or stories that reached the front page) and an Order: relevance, or newest first for monitoring. Published after, Published before, Minimum points and Minimum comments narrow the search.
3. To read particular threads, put item links or IDs into Stories. With Include comments on, a link to a single comment returns that comment and the replies under it.
4. Turn on Include comments for the comment trees and set Maximum comments per story; replies count towards it.
5. Click Start. The Output tab shows stories and comments, ready to download as CSV, Excel or JSON. SUMMARY in the key-value store counts stories and comments found and rows returned.

An API input that watches for new, well-received stories about Postgres with their discussions:

{
  "lists": [],
  "queries": ["postgres"],
  "sortBy": "date",
  "publishedAfter": "2026-10-01",
  "minPoints": 10,
  "includeComments": true,
  "maxCommentsPerStory": 300,
  "newOnly": true,
  "watchName": "postgres-mentions"
}

Example output

A Show HN story from the top list in a run on 11 October 2026. The submitter's username is replaced with a placeholder here; the actor returns the real one.

{
  "type": "story",
  "key": "story:50024055",
  "id": 50024055,
  "kind": "show",
  "title": "Show HN: The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read",
  "url": "https://readrare.com/",
  "domain": "readrare.com",
  "text": null,
  "author": "A Hacker News user",
  "points": 175,
  "commentsCount": 65,
  "createdAt": "2026-10-09T17:39:44.000Z",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024055",
  "source": "top",
  "rank": 78,
  "matchedQuery": null,
  "commentsRead": null
}

How much does it cost to scrape Hacker News?

	Free plan	Starter	Scale	Business
1,000 stories	$0.50	$0.40	$0.325	$0.25
Comment, per 1,000	$0.20	$0.16	$0.13	$0.10

You pay only for the events in the table. There is no start fee, and compute time and proxies are included.

1,000 stories cost $0.50 on the Free plan, and 10,000 comments $2.00 more ($0.25 and $1.00 on Business). Stories removed by Keywords (any of) and rows already returned in new-only mode are not charged.

Limits

• The search service returns at most 1,000 results per search term: python sorted by relevance gave exactly 1,000 in October 2026, whatever Maximum results per search term says. Split long periods with Published after and Published before to get more.
• Comment threads are read 4 stories at a time. The top 160 stories with 9,906 comments took 38 seconds on 11 October 2026, close to the default 10,000 rows of Maximum rows, so raise it for large threads.
• The filters for points, comments and dates apply to search only. Keywords (any of) applies to lists and search, matching the title, text and link.
• Deleted and dead stories are skipped, and so are comments without text.
• Points and comment counts change quickly in the first hours; the row shows them at the time of the run.
• Requests that meet a server error or HTTP 429 are repeated twice. If more than half of the requests fail, the run ends as failed.

Alerts for new stories and comments

Set a Watch name or save the input as a task, turn on Return only rows new since the last run and schedule it. Each run then returns only stories and comments that no earlier run of the watch returned, so a search sorted by newest first works as a keyword alert. Rows that Maximum rows or your spending limit cut off are not counted as seen, and the next run returns them. The CHANGES record also lists stories whose points changed since the last run.

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape Hacker News?

The actor reads public data through the two interfaces offered for it: the official Hacker News API on Firebase and the Hacker News search API run by Algolia, without logging in. Rows contain the usernames of submitters and commenters as shown on the site, but no user profiles, karma or contact data. You are responsible for how you use the data, including the privacy of the people whose comments you store.

How do I get the monthly "Who is hiring" posts?

Put the link of the month's thread into Stories, turn on Include comments and set Maximum comments per story to a few thousand, because replies count too. The job posts are the comment rows with depth 0.

Can I search by author or get user profiles?

No. The actor searches titles, links and text, and it does not read user pages.

Related scrapers

• Hacker News Search Scraper
• Hacker News Comments Scraper
• YC Jobs Scraper
• Substack Scraper

Support

This actor is built and maintained by deriverge s.r.o., a software company based in the Czech Republic. If a run fails or a field you need is missing, please open an issue in the Issues tab or write to us at info@deriverge.com. We respond in English and Czech. Runs can be scheduled in Apify Console or started from the API tab, which has examples for Python, JavaScript and cURL and works with Make, Zapier, n8n and the Apify MCP server. If the actor saves you time, a short review helps other people find it.