Hacker News Scraper - Stories, Comments, Who is Hiring

Search Hacker News stories and comments by keyword, or export the front page, the newest stories, Ask HN, Show HN and the monthly "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread as clean rows.

The Actor reads the official HN Search API by Algolia. No API key, no login and no proxy are needed. A run of 100 items takes about a second.

What you can do with it

• Track mentions of your product, company or competitors on Hacker News.
• Collect the top stories about a topic for a newsletter or research.
• Export the latest "Who is hiring?" thread as a job list with company, role and location columns.
• Pull every comment that mentions a keyword for sentiment analysis.
• Build an alert: schedule the Actor with sortBy: date and postedWithinDays: 1.

Input

Field	What it does
mode	search (stories by keyword), comments (comments by keyword), front-page, newest, ask-hn, show-hn, or who-is-hiring (job posts from the latest monthly thread).
query	Keywords. Required for useful results in search and comments; optional filter in the other modes, for example remote in who-is-hiring.
sortBy	relevance (default) or date for newest first.
minPoints	Keep only stories with at least this many points.
postedWithinDays	Keep only items created in the last N days. 0 means no limit.
maxItems	Stop after this many items. Default 200. The API returns at most 1,000 items per query.

Stories about web scraping from the last year, best first:

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "web scraping",
  "postedWithinDays": 365,
  "maxItems": 100
}

Remote jobs from the latest "Who is hiring?" thread:

{
  "mode": "who-is-hiring",
  "query": "remote",
  "maxItems": 0
}

Output

One item per story or comment:

{
  "type": "story",
  "id": "50085171",
  "title": "Game of Life – But Multiplayer, Hypermedia and Python",
  "url": "https://stario.dev/apps/life",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50085171",
  "author": "bobowski",
  "points": 54,
  "numComments": 20,
  "createdAt": "2026-10-14T10:13:39Z",
  "textHtml": null,
  "text": null,
  "storyId": "50085171",
  "storyTitle": null,
  "storyUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50085171",
  "parentId": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-16T08:13:30.745Z"
}

In who-is-hiring mode each item is a top-level post from the thread and gets extra fields parsed from its first line (Company | Role | Location | ...):

{
  "type": "comment",
  "id": "50104234",
  "author": "onnimonni",
  "createdAt": "2026-10-15T14:30:58Z",
  "headline": "Treat Health | Full-stack Engineer (Elixir, Phoenix LiveView, React) | Helsinki, Finland | ONSITE | Full-time | Compensation in the link below",
  "company": "Treat Health",
  "role": "Full-stack Engineer (Elixir, Phoenix LiveView, React)",
  "location": "Helsinki, Finland",
  "remote": null,
  "text": "Treat Health | Full-stack Engineer ... \nTreat Health is building healthcare where ...",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104234"
}

remote is true when the headline mentions remote work, false when it says "no remote" or "onsite only", and null otherwise. company, role and location follow the thread's usual | convention and are null for posts that use a different format.

Limits and notes

• The HN Search API returns at most 1,000 items per query. Narrow the query or the date range to go deeper.
• points and numComments are null for comments.
• minPoints is ignored for comments.
• Text fields are provided as HTML (textHtml) and as plain text (text).
• The "Who is hiring?" thread is found automatically (the latest story by the whoishiring account whose title contains "Who is hiring"). Replies to job posts are not included.

Pricing

You pay per item saved to the dataset, plus a tiny fee per run start.