Hacker News Scraper — Stories, Comments & Ask/Show HN, No Key, Clean JSON

Scrape Hacker News by keyword and filters and get back clean, structured JSON — title, URL, author, points, comment count, text, timestamps and the HN item link. Fetch stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs, polls or the front page, filtered by points, comments and date range, sorted by relevance or newest. It runs on the public HN Algolia API over fast, plain HTTP. No account, no API key. Built for researchers, trend trackers and anyone mining HN discussion at scale.

Features

• 🗂️ Every content type — tags selects Stories, Comments, Ask HN, Show HN, Polls, Jobs or Front page.
• 🔎 Keyword or filter-only — set a query, or leave it empty and list purely by tag and filters.
• 📊 Threshold filters — minPoints and minComments keep only items that cleared a bar.
• 📅 Date range — dateFrom and dateTo (ISO or YYYY-MM-DD) scope results to a window.
• 🔀 Sort your way — sortBy toggles relevance (best match) or date (newest first).
• 🧹 Clean text — HTML and entities in story/comment bodies are stripped and decoded into readable text.
• ⚡ Fast, keyless HTTP — paginates the HN Algolia API automatically, up to maxItems.

What you get

Every item becomes one clean JSON record:

{
  "type": "story",
  "id": "40912345",
  "title": "Show HN: I built a Rust-based log parser",
  "url": "https://example.com/rust-log-parser",
  "author": "pg_user",
  "points": 284,
  "numComments": 96,
  "text": null,
  "storyId": null,
  "parentId": null,
  "createdAt": "2026-07-20T15:04:00.000Z",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40912345",
  "tags": ["story", "show_hn"]
}

Output schema

Field	Type	Description
type	string	Content type of the item — story, comment, poll, job, etc.
id	string	Unique Hacker News item ID.
title	string	Story or post title (null for standalone comments).
url	string	External link submitted with the story (null if none).
author	string	Username of the item's author.
points	integer	Score / upvote count for the item.
numComments	integer	Number of comments on the item.
text	string	Cleaned body text of the post or comment, HTML stripped.
storyId	integer	ID of the parent story a comment belongs to.
parentId	string	ID of the direct parent item in the thread.
createdAt	string (ISO date)	Timestamp when the item was posted.
hnUrl	string (URL)	Link to the item on news.ycombinator.com.
tags	array	HN category tags applied to the item (e.g. story, show_hn).

Input

{
  "query": "rust",
  "tags": "story",
  "sortBy": "date",
  "minPoints": 50,
  "minComments": 10,
  "maxItems": 200
}

Field	Description
query	Keyword to search. Leave empty to list by tag/filters only (e.g. all front-page stories).
tags	What to fetch: Stories, Comments, Ask HN, Show HN, Polls, Jobs or Front page.
sortBy	Relevance (best match) or date (newest first).
minPoints / minComments	Only items with at least this many points / comments.
dateFrom / dateTo	ISO date or YYYY-MM-DD lower / upper bound.
maxItems	Max items to return.

Use cases

• Track how a topic (a framework, a company, a trend) is discussed on HN over time.
• Pull all high-scoring Show HN or Ask HN posts in a date range for a newsletter.
• Mine top comments on a story for sentiment or research.
• Build a dataset of front-page stories with points and comment counts.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: you're billed a small amount per run and per item scraped — you only pay for what you get. See the Pricing tab for current rates.

FAQ

Do I need a Hacker News account or API key? No. The actor runs on the public Hacker News Algolia Search API over plain HTTP — no account, login or API key.

How many items can I scrape per run? As many as you set with maxItems. The actor paginates the Algolia API automatically until it reaches your limit.

What content types can I fetch? Use tags to select Stories, Comments, Ask HN, Show HN, Polls, Jobs or the Front page. Leave query empty to list purely by tag and filters.

What's the output format? Structured JSON — one record per item with type, title, url, author, points, numComments, cleaned text, timestamps, tags and the hnUrl item link. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel or via the API.

Can I filter by points, comments or date? Yes. Use minPoints and minComments for thresholds, dateFrom / dateTo (ISO or YYYY-MM-DD) for a window, and sortBy to switch between relevance and newest-first.

Can I connect this to other apps? The Hacker News Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. It works with Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Drive and many more, plus the Apify API, JavaScript/Python clients and MCP. Or use webhooks to trigger an action whenever a run finishes.

Related Actors

Tracking developer discussion and trends? Combine this with our other developer-data scrapers:

• Stack Overflow & Stack Exchange Scraper — questions by tag or search across Stack Exchange sites.
• GitHub Scraper — repositories and user profiles with stars, topics, licenses and leads.
• Wikipedia Scraper — full article text, summaries and pageviews in any language.
• npm Package Scraper — search and look up npm packages with metadata, dependencies and downloads.

Notes

This Actor uses the public Hacker News Algolia Search API. It is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Y Combinator or Algolia; "Hacker News" is a trademark of its respective owner.