📰 Hacker News Who Is Hiring Scraper

Extract structured job listings from Hacker News "Ask HN: Who is Hiring?" monthly threads — the most developer-trusted job board on the internet. No AI, no OpenAI API key, no proxy, no browser needed. Pure deterministic regex parsing against the free Algolia HN API.

Every first business day of the month, the @whoishiring account posts a new thread on Hacker News. Hundreds of companies — mostly startups, many posted directly by founders — drop job listings as plain-text comments. This scraper fetches those threads, parses every comment, and returns clean structured JSON.

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🔍 What you get

Each job listing is parsed into structured fields:

Field	Description	Example
company	Company name	"Stripe"
role	Job title	"Senior Backend Engineer"
location	Office location(s)	"San Francisco, Remote"
remote	Remote policy	"Remote" / "Hybrid" / "Onsite"
salary	Salary range if mentioned	"$150k–$220k"
techStack	Technologies detected	["Python", "Kubernetes", "PostgreSQL"]
visa	Visa sponsorship info	"Visa sponsorship available"
applyUrl	Application or company URL	"https://stripe.com/jobs/..."
email	Contact email if present	"jobs@company.com"
fullText	Complete job posting text	"We are looking for..."
threadMonth	Source month	"March 2026"
author	HN username	"dang"
hnUrl	Direct HN comment link	"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=..."
postedAt	ISO timestamp	"2026-03-03T14:22:31.000Z"

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💡 Modes

hiring — Who is Hiring? threads (default)

Fetches the most recent N monthly "Who is Hiring?" threads and parses every top-level job comment. This is the main mode.

thread — Specific thread IDs

Fetch and parse all top-level comments from any HN thread. Useful for:

• "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?"
• "Ask HN: Seeking freelancer?"
• Any custom thread

search — Keyword search

Full-text search across all HN posts and comments via Algolia. Returns matching results sorted by date.

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⚙️ Input options

Scrape the latest month (default)

{
  "mode": "hiring",
  "months": 1,
  "maxResults": 500
}

Scrape 6 months for trend analysis

{
  "mode": "hiring",
  "months": 6,
  "maxResults": 0
}

Remote Python jobs only

{
  "mode": "hiring",
  "months": 2,
  "remoteOnly": true,
  "filterKeywords": ["Python"],
  "maxResults": 200
}

Specific thread by ID

{
  "mode": "thread",
  "threadIds": ["43574497"],
  "maxResults": 500
}

Keyword search

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "founding engineer Series A",
  "maxResults": 100
}

---

📊 Sample output

{
  "commentId": "43578234",
  "threadId": "43574497",
  "threadTitle": "Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (March 2026)",
  "threadMonth": "March 2026",
  "author": "acmecorp_hiring",
  "company": "Acme Corp",
  "role": "Senior Backend Engineer",
  "location": "San Francisco",
  "remote": "Remote",
  "salary": "$160k–$200k",
  "techStack": ["Go", "Kubernetes", "PostgreSQL", "Redis"],
  "visa": "Visa sponsorship available",
  "applyUrl": "https://acmecorp.com/jobs/backend",
  "email": null,
  "fullText": "Acme Corp | Senior Backend Engineer | Remote | $160k–$200k\n\nWe're building...",
  "postedAt": "2026-03-03T15:12:44.000Z",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43578234",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-03-23T10:00:00.000Z"
}

---

🚀 Performance

• No browser, no proxy, no authentication — direct HTTP to Algolia's HN API
• A full single month (~700 jobs) completes in under 60 seconds
• 6 months of history (~4,000 jobs) completes in under 5 minutes
• Rate limited to 1 request/500ms — well within Algolia's 10,000 req/hour free limit

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💰 Use cases

Job seekers Search for startup and tech jobs posted directly by founders — these often never appear on LinkedIn or Indeed. Filter by tech stack, location, or remote policy to get a targeted list in seconds.

Recruiters & sourcing teams Monitor which companies are actively hiring in the HN community month over month. Identify high-growth startups before they become household names.

Job board operators Ingest founder-posted job listings that don't get submitted to traditional boards. Deduplicate against your existing listings using company + role + threadMonth.

Market researchers Track which technologies companies are hiring for over time. Compare monthly demand for React vs Vue, Python vs Go, or AWS vs GCP across 24 months of data.

Data teams & analysts Build structured datasets from HN's unstructured comment archive. Export to CSV, JSON, or Excel directly from the Apify dataset.

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🔒 Technical notes

This scraper uses two public, unauthenticated APIs:

1. Algolia HN Search API (hn.algolia.com/api/v1) — for finding threads and full-text search. Rate limit: 10,000 requests/hour.
2. Algolia Items API (hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/{id}) — fetches an entire thread's comment tree in a single request. This is faster and more reliable than the Firebase API's recursive item-by-item approach.

No API key is required. No proxy is needed. The APIs are publicly accessible and free.

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❓ FAQ

How many jobs are in each thread? A typical "Who is Hiring?" thread receives 400–900 top-level job postings per month. The volume has grown steadily since the thread started in 2011.

How accurate is the parsing? The parser uses deterministic regex — same input always produces the same output. Company name and role are parsed from the first line of each posting (the de facto HN job format: Company | Role | Location | Remote). Tech stack detection covers 50+ common technologies. Salary, remote status, visa and URLs use targeted regex patterns.

What about posts that don't follow the standard format? All postings are included regardless of format. Fields that can't be parsed are returned as null. The fullText field always contains the complete raw text for your own processing.

Can I scrape "Who wants to be hired?" threads too? Yes — use mode: "thread" and provide the thread ID. Find the ID in the URL of any HN post: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43574497.

How far back does the data go? The Algolia index covers the full HN archive back to 2006. Set months up to 24 for two years of hiring history. The "Who is Hiring?" threads go back to 2011.