Hacker News Scraper — Top, New & Best Stories as Clean JSON

Launch pricing: this actor currently adds no fee — run it on your Apify free-plan credits. Try it, bookmark it, wire it into your stack.

A Hacker News scraper on the official Firebase API: scrape Hacker News Top, New or Best lists and get title, link, score, comment count and timestamps as clean JSON. It's an HN API scraper — fast, keyless, unblockable — and works as a Hacker News top stories scraper for daily digests, dashboards and tech trend monitoring pipelines.

The tech zeitgeist, structured: 50 stories in seconds, no usernames, no HTML parsing.

Who uses this

• Content curators & newsletter writers — the morning Top-30 with scores and comment counts, ready to summarize.
• Founders, PR & marketers — track when your product, category or competitors hit the front page.
• Trend analysts — score + comment velocity over scheduled runs = what the dev world cares about this week.
• LLM pipelines — clean JSON for summarization and classification agents.

Want the code layer under the discussion layer? The GitHub Repositories Scraper tracks the repos those threads are about.

How it works

The actor fetches the official HN Firebase list you choose (topstories, newstories, beststories), then loads each story item with bounded concurrency (16 parallel requests). Author usernames (by) and comment id trees (kids) are intentionally excluded. A failed list fetch, all-items-failed, or zero stories pushed fails the run loudly instead of succeeding empty.

Output

One record per story:

{
  "id": 48915709,
  "type": "story",
  "title": "Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail",
  "url": "https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/index.html",
  "score": 425,
  "commentCount": 102,
  "time": 1784084267,
  "timeIso": "2026-07-15T02:57:47.000Z",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-15T09:34:39.233Z"
}

• url is the external link; Ask/Show HN posts may have url: null — link them as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=<id>.
• score and commentCount are point-in-time — schedule runs to capture velocity.

Input

Field	Default	Description
listType	topstories	topstories (Top), newstories (New) or beststories (Best); short forms top/new/best work too
maxItems	50	Stories to fetch from the top of the list (HN exposes up to 500)

The default run needs no configuration — an empty input fetches the current Top 50.

Reliability & limits

• Official HN Firebase API — no scraping of news.ycombinator.com, nothing to block or break.
• Deleted/dead items are skipped automatically; the run fails loudly if literally nothing could be fetched.
• Scores change minute-to-minute; treat each run as a snapshot and schedule for time series.

Paste this output into…

• Google Sheets — =IMPORTDATA("https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/exuberant_volley~hackernews-scraper/runs/last/dataset/items?format=csv&clean=1&token=YOUR_TOKEN") for a self-refreshing front-page sheet.
• Make / n8n — schedule at 07:00, fetch .../runs/last/dataset/items, filter score > 100, and post to your team's Slack channel.
• Morning digest (curators) — pipe the Top-30 JSON into an LLM step ("group by theme, 1-line summary each, keep links") and email it to yourself — a zero-cost personal briefing.

ScrapeForge free data suite

One publisher, ten plug-and-play datasets — all currently free to run:

Actor	What it delivers
Executive Changes Tracker	New CEO/CFO/board moves from SEC 8-Ks + official newswires — source-cited B2B trigger leads	run it next →
IKEA Product Scraper	Names, prices, ratings and images from any IKEA search or category page	run it next →
Shopify Store Scraper	Any Shopify store's full catalog — variants, SKUs, prices — via products.json	run it next →
App Store Apps Scraper	App rankings, ratings, prices and metadata by keyword, any country	run it next →
Remote Jobs Scraper	Live remote listings from RemoteOK + Remotive, keyword-filtered	run it next →
CoinGecko Market Scraper	Top-coin prices, market caps and 24h moves — keyless	run it next →
GitHub Repositories Scraper	Repo search with stars, forks, topics and licenses	run it next →
Hacker News Scraper	Top/New/Best HN stories with scores and comment counts	run it next →
Wikipedia Scraper	Article summaries, images and URLs in any language — RAG-ready	run it next →
SEC EDGAR Filings Scraper	Any US public company's filing history by ticker	run it next →

Compliance

• No personal data — the author field (by) and comment id list (kids) are intentionally excluded; story catalog data only, GDPR-safe.
• Official API underneath — the public HN Firebase API; no HTML parsing.
• Records live only in your run's dataset; the actor keeps nothing beyond it.