HN Scraper - Hacker News Stories, Comments, Ask & Show HN

A Show HN scraper for Hacker News: Show HN, Ask HN, front-page stories and comments with points, authors and timestamps — no API key.

What the Show HN scraper returns

Search Hacker News by keyword and export stories, comments, Ask HN and Show HN posts with points, author, date and discussion links - powered by the public Algolia HN Search API. No API key.

• Every content type - story, comment, ask_hn, show_hn, poll, front_page
• Real filters - author, minimum points, minimum comments, recency window
• Sort by relevance or date
• 14 stable columns, exportable to CSV/JSON/Excel

Quick start

Open the actor, keep the defaults, press Save & start. The reference run below is exactly that. Then adjust the input for your own search and export CSV, JSON or Excel from the dataset tab - or call it from the API and read the dataset programmatically.

A real row

Straight from a reference run, trimmed to the highlights:

{
  "type": "story",
  "title": "Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)",
  "author": "ehurynovich",
  "points": 1057,
  "num_comments": 388,
  "created_at": "2020-01-29T14:06:37Z",
  "url": "https://parsers.me/us-court-fully-legalized-website-scraping-and-technically-prohibited-it/",
  "hn_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559",
  "object_id": "22180559",
  "story_id": "22180559",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-12T13:38:12Z",
  "actor_build": "0.1.5"
}

How it works

Queries go to the public Algolia HN Search API with your filters mapped to its parameters; results are normalized (points, author, timestamps, links) into the fixed table.

Every column, with measured fill

Column	Filled on the reference run
type	100%
title	100%
author	100%
points	100%
num_comments	100%
created_at	100%
url	94%
hn_url	100%
object_id	100%
story_id	100%
text	9%
scraped_at	100%
actor_build	100%
actor_run_id	100%

A missing value is null; the column set never shifts, so your CSV import is stable across runs.

Input reference

Field	Type	Default	Notes
query	string	web scraping	Keywords to search for across Hacker News, e.g. 'apify', 'web scraping', 'your product name'. Leave empty to f
tags	string	story	Which kind of Hacker News item to return.
searchType	string	relevance	'Relevance' returns the best keyword matches; 'Newest' returns the most recent items first.
author	string		Restrict results to a single Hacker News username (exact, case-sensitive), e.g. 'pg'.
minPoints	integer	0	Only keep items with at least this many points (0 = no filter).
minComments	integer	0	Only keep items with at least this many comments (0 = no filter).
sinceDays	integer	0	Only keep items posted in the last N days (0 = all time).
includeText	boolean	True	Include the story/comment body text in each row. Turn off for smaller rows.
maxItems	integer	100	Maximum number of items to return.

Pricing

Pay per result - charged only for rows delivered; the current rate is on this page's Pricing tab. Zero results cost zero, and failed fetches are never billed.

Use cases

• Launch research - Every Show HN in your category, with points as a demand signal
• Content mining - What HN said about a tool or topic, comments included
• Trend tracking - Weekly export of top stories for a keyword

Honest limits

We would rather say it here than have you find out on a paid run:

• Points and comment counts are values at fetch time - they keep moving on live threads
• Comment rows are flat (linked by story id), not a reconstructed tree

Scheduling & integrations

Every input works identically from the API, so this actor drops into schedules and pipelines: run it on an Apify Schedule for a recurring export, point a webhook at the finished run to push rows into Slack, Google Sheets (via Zapier/Make/n8n) or your warehouse, and page through the dataset with the standard Dataset API. Saved tasks keep your configuration one click away.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? The public Algolia-powered HN Search API - the same one hn.algolia.com uses.

Can I fetch a whole thread? Fetch comments filtered by the story's id - each row links back to its story.

Related actors from this account

• Github Repo Scraper
• Multi Jobboard Scraper
• Steam Games Scraper

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Built by Flash Scrape - measured claims, stable columns, no API keys. Something missing? Open an issue on this actor and ask.