Hacker News Scraper

Scrape stories from Hacker News — Top, Ask HN, Show HN, Best, and New — with points, authors, comment counts, and direct links. Built with BeautifulSoupCrawler for fast static page parsing.

What does Hacker News Scraper do?

This Actor extracts story data from Hacker News listing pages. Each result includes the story title, external URL (or HN discussion link for self-posts), upvote count, author, comment count, direct HN permalink, and relative timestamp. It covers all five main HN sections in a single lightweight crawl — no JavaScript rendering needed.

Since it runs on the Apify platform, you get API access, scheduling, proxy rotation, monitoring, and integrations with Zapier, Make, Google Drive, and more out of the box.

Why use Hacker News Scraper?

• Track trending topics — monitor the front page or specific sections over time
• Build datasets — collect historical HN data for analysis, research, or ML
• Feed dashboards — pipe story data into your own tools or notifications
• Content discovery — find what's popular in Ask HN, Show HN, or Best sections
• Pay only for what you use — first 10 results per run are free

Use Cases

How to track top tech news for a daily digest

Schedule a daily run with section: "top" and max_results: 30 to capture the Hacker News front page each morning. Export to JSON or CSV and feed into your newsletter pipeline, Slack channel, or dashboard.

How to discover new developer projects on Show HN

Run with section: "show" to get the latest Show HN submissions. These are new projects, tools, and startups shared by the HN community. Filter by keywords in the title to find projects in your area of interest.

How to find technical discussions on Ask HN

Use section: "ask" to scrape Ask HN threads where developers ask questions about career advice, technical challenges, and industry trends. The comment count field helps identify the most active discussions.

How to monitor Hacker News for brand mentions

Run daily with section: "top" and filter results by your company name in the title field. The points and comments fields indicate how much attention the mention is getting.

How to use Hacker News Scraper

1. Go to the Hacker News Scraper page in Apify Console.
2. Click Try or Start to open the input form.
3. Choose a Section (Top, Ask HN, Show HN, Best, or New) and set Maximum Results (up to 100).
4. Click Run and wait for the results.
5. Download the dataset in JSON, HTML, CSV, Excel, or access it via the API.

You can also run it locally with apify run --input-file=test-input.json.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
section	string	top	HN section: top, ask, show, best, or new
max_results	integer	30	Max stories to scrape (1–100, first 10 free)

Example input

{
    "section": "show",
    "max_results": 25
}

Output

Each dataset item is a single HN story:

[
    {
        "title": "Show HN: Runloom – Go-style coroutines for Python free-threaded",
        "url": "https://github.com/robertsdotpm/runloom",
        "points": 21,
        "author": "Uptrenda",
        "comments": 9,
        "hn_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48861478",
        "created_at": "2 hours ago"
    }
]

Data fields

Field	Type	Description
title	string	Story title
url	string	External story URL (or HN discussion link for self-posts)
points	integer	Upvote count
author	string	Submitter username
comments	integer	Number of comments
hn_url	string	Direct link to the HN discussion page
created_at	string	Relative time (e.g. "2 hours ago")

nCost example: 30 stories = 20 paid × $0.02 = $0.40 per run. First 10 results are free.

Pricing

First 10 results per run are free. Beyond that, each additional result costs $0.02.

For a typical run of 30 stories:

• 10 free → $0.00
• 20 charged → $0.40

Hacker News has no rate limiting for static page requests, and the BeautifulSoupCrawler is lightweight, so runs complete in seconds.

Tips

• Use max_results: 100 for a full page of results in a single request.
• The scraper makes exactly one HTTP request per run — it parses the listing page in memory.
• Set section: "new" to track the newest submissions as they appear.
• Self-posts (Ask HN, Show HN) where the story has no external URL link back to the HN discussion page instead.

FAQ and disclaimers

Is this legal? Hacker News explicitly allows automated access. This scraper respects the site's structure and makes a single request per run — well within acceptable use.

Are there any limits? The Actor limits results to 100 per run. For larger datasets, schedule recurring runs and aggregate results.

Need help or custom features? Open an issue on the Issues tab or reach out for custom Actor development.