Hacker News Scraper

Hacker News scraper for stories, comments, users and the front page, with no login and no API key. Search Hacker News by keyword with date and points filters, grab the current front page, pull everything a user posted, or download whole comment threads. It uses the public Algolia HN Search API, so runs are fast and you pay per result.

What you can do with it

• Brand / topic monitoring — schedule search mode with sortBy: date for your product, competitor or technology and push new threads into Slack, a sheet, or an LLM summarizer.
• Launch and trend research — type: show_hn or ask_hn with minPoints shows what the community actually upvotes.
• Sentiment and feedback mining — story_comments mode returns every comment of a thread as plain text, ready for analysis.
• Founder / author tracking — user mode lists everything a user submitted or commented on, newest first.
• Front page snapshots — run front_page hourly to build a ranking history.
• Automated feeds — Schedule it on Apify and pipe results to Google Sheets, Slack, n8n or Make via the Apify integration.
• Hiring and job leads — search query: "who is hiring" with sortBy: date, then pull the thread with story_comments to get every job post as text.

Output example

Story (type: "story"):

{
  "type": "story",
  "id": "46111542",
  "title": "Rust 1.91 released",
  "url": "https://blog.rust-lang.org/…",
  "hn_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46111542",
  "author": "pg",
  "points": 512,
  "num_comments": 301,
  "created_at": "2026-10-30T14:02:11Z",
  "story_text": null,
  "comment_text": null,
  "story_id": null,
  "parent_id": null,
  "tags": ["story", "author_pg", "story_46111542"]
}

Comment (type: "comment"; title is null, story_id points to the thread):

{
  "type": "comment",
  "id": "8952",
  "title": null,
  "url": null,
  "hn_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8952",
  "author": "sama",
  "points": null,
  "num_comments": null,
  "created_at": "2015-02-22T10:00:00Z",
  "story_text": null,
  "comment_text": "Plain text of the comment, HTML stripped.",
  "story_id": "8863",
  "parent_id": "8870",
  "tags": ["comment", "author_sama", "story_8863"]
}

Input

Field	Description
mode	search (default), front_page, user, story_comments
query	Mode search. Keywords; empty = browse by type / date / points.
type	Modes search, user. story (default), comment, ask_hn, show_hn, all (stories + comments).
sortBy	Mode search. relevance (default) or date (newest first).
minPoints	Modes search, user. Minimum points.
dateFrom, dateTo	Modes search, user. YYYY-MM-DD, UTC, inclusive.
user	Mode user. HN username.
storyIds	Mode story_comments. Story ids (the number in item?id=…).
maxItems	Stop after N rows total. Default 100.

Pricing

Pay per item: one event per dataset row (story or comment). Nothing is charged for rows that are never produced.

Notes

• The search API returns at most 1000 hits per query. For larger exports, split the run into dateFrom / dateTo windows.
• user mode is always newest first. Comment rows have points: null.
• story_comments returns all comments in the thread (not only top-level); use parent_id to rebuild the tree.

FAQ

Do I need an API key or account?

Algolia's public HN Search API needs no key or account. It is rate-limited per IP, which normal runs stay well under.

How much does it cost?

$0.002 per result and nothing else: with pay-per-event pricing you are not billed for Apify compute. 100 results cost $0.20, and the Apify free plan's $5 monthly credit covers about 2,500 results. Rows that are never produced are never charged.

How do I get the data into Google Sheets or my app?

Export the run's dataset as CSV, JSON or Excel from the Apify Console, read it from the dataset API endpoint, or connect it to Google Sheets, Slack, n8n, Make or Zapier with Apify integrations.

Is it legal to scrape Hacker News?

It only reads public data via the platform's public API and respects rate limits. You are responsible for complying with Hacker News's terms and applicable law.

Can I export more than 1,000 results for one search?

Not in one query: the search API returns at most 1,000 hits per query. Split the export into dateFrom / dateTo windows (for example one month per run) and combine the datasets.

Related Actors

• Lemmy Scraper
• Substack Posts Scraper
• Hugging Face Hub Scraper