Hacker News Scraper — Stories, Comments & Search

Get Hacker News stories — from the front page, New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN and Jobs, or from a search over all of Hacker News — with title, link, points, comment count, date and kind, and, if you want, their comment threads.

Why this one

• 📋 Every list, in site order. The front page (up to 500 stories), New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN and Jobs, each story with its position.
• 🔎 Search past the 1,000 limit. Hacker News search stops at 1,000 results per query. Set dates and the Actor reads the period week by week: a live test run returned 1,500 "rust" stories from July to September.
• 💬 Comment threads. Every story's comments in reading order, with depth and parent, as plain text.
• ⚡ Fast and light. 2,187 stories — 1,162 of them with comments — in under four minutes, using Hacker News' own public APIs.
• 🔒 No usernames. Stories and comments are delivered without their authors' handles.

What you get

For every story:

Field	What it is
title, url, domain	the story and where it links
points, commentCount	score and discussion size
createdAt	when it was posted, ISO 8601
kind	story, ask, show, launch, job or poll
text	the text of Ask HN / Show HN posts
hnUrl, storyId	the discussion on Hacker News
comments	with Comments on: commentId, parentId, depth, createdAt, text
input, source, position, scrapedAt, status, error	which list or search it came from, and its place there

Example

A real record from a live run — the front page, 24 September 2026 (two comments shown, shortened):

{
  "source": "top",
  "position": 1,
  "title": "F-Droid 2.0: A New Chapter for Android Freedom",
  "url": "https://f-droid.org/2026/09/24/f-droid-2.0-a-new-chapter-for-android-freedom.html",
  "domain": "f-droid.org",
  "points": 127,
  "commentCount": 36,
  "createdAt": "2026-09-24T15:26:12.000Z",
  "kind": "story",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49831968",
  "comments": [
    { "commentId": 49832234, "parentId": 49831968, "depth": 0, "createdAt": "2026-09-24T15:40:10.000Z", "text": "This is very good to see. Classic F-Droid always seemed to fail at updating repos at least…" },
    { "commentId": 49832418, "parentId": 49832234, "depth": 1, "createdAt": "2026-09-24T15:51:04.000Z", "text": "Repo timestamp expected blah blah... toast coming out of nowhere is such a bad design. Rea…" }
  ],
  "status": "OK"
}

How to use it

1. Pick Lists and/or add Search queries.
2. For searches, choose the Search order and optionally a date range.
3. Set Max stories per list or query, and switch on Comments if you need them.
4. Press Start, and download the results from the Output tab as JSON, CSV or Excel.

To follow what Hacker News says about your product or your field, save a search as a task and schedule it daily.

You can also call it from the Apify API, from Make, Zapier or n8n, or from an AI agent through the Apify MCP server.

Pricing

You are charged per story delivered — see the price on this page. Comments come with their story at no extra charge.

FAQ

Why no usernames? Handles identify people. Most uses — trend tracking, sentiment, product mentions — do not need them.

Is this affiliated with Hacker News or Y Combinator? No. This is an independent tool that uses Hacker News' public APIs (the official Firebase API and the Algolia search API).

Like it? A short review on the Store page helps other people find this Actor. Something missing or broken? Tell us on the Issues tab — we read every one.