📰 Hacker News Stories, Discussions & Jobs Scraper

Fast, complete, and 100% reliable Hacker News scraper and API. Extracts Top Stories, Best Stories, New Submissions, Show HN, Ask HN, and Job postings with zero rate limits or browser overhead.

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⚡ Key Features

• Blazing Fast: Asynchronous official API extraction with concurrency. Scrapes 100 stories in under 2 seconds.
• Multiple Feeds:
  • topstories: Current Top Stories leaderboard
  • beststories: Highest all-time voted stories
  • newstories: Real-time newest submissions
  • showstories: Show HN creator launches
  • askstories: Ask HN community discussions
  • jobstories: Y Combinator startup job postings
• Zero Cost Compute: Operates smoothly within 128MB–256MB RAM.

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📥 Input Example

{
  "categories": ["topstories", "showstories", "askstories"],
  "maxItemsPerCategory": 50
}

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📤 Output Example

{
  "id": 41738291,
  "title": "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything",
  "url": "https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/3/default-hard-budget-caps/",
  "hackerNewsUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41738291",
  "score": 342,
  "by": "elffjs",
  "commentsCount": 184,
  "type": "story",
  "category": "topstories",
  "postedAt": "2026-10-03T20:14:12+00:00"
}

More actors by flyingnimbus

All pay-per-event and fast. Failed or empty runs are free:

• Google Trends
• Google Flights
• Google Hotels
• AI Search Visibility Tracker
• Google Ads Transparency
• Google Jobs
• Google Shopping
• Career Site Jobs
• YouTube Search

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.001 per item ($1 per 1,000). You only pay for results delivered. Platform compute is included, so there are no extra usage charges. Set a maximum budget on the run to cap spend.

How to use it

1. Open the Input tab and fill in the fields (the prefilled example works as is).
2. Click Start and wait for the run to finish.
3. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it through the Apify API.

You can schedule runs, call the actor from the API, or connect it to Make, Zapier, n8n or an AI agent through MCP.

FAQ

Is the data live? Yes. Each run fetches fresh data at the time you run it.

What happens when nothing is found? The run finishes without charging for empty results.

Can I use this in an AI agent? Yes. It runs with limited permissions and returns structured JSON, so agents can call it through the Apify MCP server.

Is it legal? The actor collects publicly available information. You are responsible for using the data in line with the source's terms and applicable law, including privacy rules. Do not use it to collect personal data without a lawful basis.

Something broke or you need a field added? Open an issue on the Issues tab. Reports are read and fixed quickly.