🟧 Hacker News Show HN Tracker — Indie-launch stream filtered to Show HN posts only

The Hacker News Show HN Tracker pulls the live and historical 'Show HN' submission stream from news.ycombinator.com — the long-running indie-launch venue where solo founders and small teams post their projects for feedback. Each row gives you the post title, target URL, author handle, upvote count, comment count, posted timestamp, and the post-body text. Ideal for indie-dev intelligence, dev-tool ICP discovery, and trend research on what builders ship.

Why Hacker News Show HN Tracker Beats Hacker News, Product Hunt, and Indie Hackers

Source	Price	What you get
Hacker News (official)	Free	Manual browse, no Show-HN-only filter, no JSON archive
Product Hunt	Free + paid Pro	Different community, requires login for bulk view
Indie Hackers	Free	Different community, no Show HN coverage
Algolia HN Search	Free + paid	Search API exists but no Show-HN-curated stream with metadata
NexGenData Show HN Tracker	PPE per post	Show-HN-only feed: title, URL, author, upvotes, comments, posted date — bulk JSON

What You Get

• HN post ID + canonical news.ycombinator.com URL
• Title (with the 'Show HN: ' prefix preserved)
• Target URL the maker is showing (typically the product domain)
• Author HN handle
• Posted Unix timestamp + ISO datetime
• Upvote count (at scrape time)
• Comment count (at scrape time)
• Post body text (when the author wrote one)
• Top-N comment authors (when configured)
• Domain of the target URL (extracted)
• Rank on the front page or Show-HN section (when applicable at scrape time)

Use Cases

• Dev-tool / SaaS ICP discovery — indie founders showing AI / dev-tools / SaaS on HN are warm targets for adjacent dev-infra products.
• Trend research — what are indie devs shipping this month? Bucket Show HN posts by tag / topic / domain.
• Investor scouting — surface emerging tools with 200+ HN upvotes that haven't yet hit Product Hunt or Crunchbase.
• Domain-portfolio scouting — track which new domains get HN traction to inform domain-name acquisition decisions.
• Press research — journalists need 'what shipped this week' coverage on the indie scene.
• Founder benchmarking — first-time launchers studying which Show HN posts got traction and why (titles, posting time, body length).
• Acquisition pipeline — small-acquirer marketplaces (MicroAcquire, Acquire.com) can identify products that ship but stall.

Quick Start

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run_input = {
    "sinceHours": 24,
    "minUpvotes": 10,
    "maxItems": 200
}

run = client.actor("nexgendata/hn-show-hn-tracker").call(run_input=run_input)

# Iterate results
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# Or fetch all in one go
items = list(client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items())
print(f"Got {len(items)} rows")

You can also run from the Apify CLI:

apify call nexgendata/hn-show-hn-tracker --input='{
    "sinceHours": 24,
    "minUpvotes": 10,
    "maxItems": 200
}'

Or from the web console: open the actor page on Apify, click Try for free, paste the input JSON, hit Run. Results stream into the dataset which you can export as JSON / JSONL / CSV / Excel / HTML.

Scheduling

This actor pairs cleanly with Apify Scheduler (built into the platform) — schedule it hourly / daily / cron-style and dedupe results into your warehouse on the stable primary-key fields documented above. Webhook outputs are supported, so you can fire a Slack / Zapier / Make / n8n / your-own-API call the moment new rows materialize.

Integration patterns

• CRM enrichment: pipe rows directly into HubSpot / Salesforce / Pipedrive via Zapier or Make
• Warehouse: append to BigQuery / Snowflake / Postgres on a daily schedule via Apify → S3 → warehouse ingest
• LLM-ready RAG: each row is already JSON-flat; embed the plain-text body field and store in pgvector / Pinecone / Weaviate
• Slack alerts: filter by your trigger keyword and fire a Slack webhook for matches in real-time

Pricing

This actor runs on Apify's pay-per-event (PPE) model — you pay only for results, not run-time:

• $0.02 per Show HN post — the primary event (one charge per row pushed to the dataset)
• 0.00005 USD per actor-start GB-event — actor start cost (one-time per run, sub-cent at typical memory)

No subscriptions, no minimums, no per-CPU-second charges. Apify's $5/month free tier covers most experiments. Browse 200+ buyer-intent actors at https://apify.com/nexgendata?fpr=2ayu9b

Cost worked example

A daily scheduled run pulling 500 fresh rows costs roughly:

• 500 rows × primary-event price (~$0.04-0.05) = $20-25
• 1 actor start × ~$0.00005 = negligible

So ~$20-25 per 500-row daily run, or ~$0.04-0.05 per row all-in. There are no surprise compute, storage, or proxy add-ons — proxy rotation is bundled into the per-row price.

Why pay-per-event beats time-based pricing

• Predictable: you know your cost from row count before the run starts
• Failure-safe: if a target site changes its HTML and the actor returns 0 rows, you pay 0 (vs paying for the CPU-seconds anyway under time-based pricing)
• Easy to attribute: 1 row = 1 unit cost, so per-customer / per-pipeline cost accounting is trivial

Sister Actors in the NexGenData Fleet

Use case	Actor
Y Combinator alumni database	yc-companies-directory-scraper
Daily Product Hunt launch stream	product-hunt-launches-scraper
Indie Hackers solo & bootstrapped tracker	indie-hackers-products-tracker
Crunchbase news & funding announcements	crunchbase-news-scraper
AngelList startup discovery	angellist-startup-search
SEC Form D private placement filings	sec-form-d-scraper
Techstars alumni & cohorts	techstars-companies-directory

(All sister actors share the same PPE billing and Apify-standard JSON output, so you can compose multi-step pipelines without rewriting input/output adapters.)

FAQ

Q: How far back does the data go?

A: Hacker News API exposes all historical Show HN posts since the tag's inception. The actor can pull anything from the last 24 hours up to the entire historical archive — your choice via input.

Q: How fresh is the live data?

A: HN's public API (Firebase) updates within seconds of a post going live. The actor reads from there.

Q: Does it use the Hacker News API?

A: Yes — the actor uses the public HN Firebase API, augmented with HTML scraping for fields the API doesn't expose (rank, comment-author profiles).

Q: Will I be rate-limited?

A: Firebase is generous — typical scrape volumes are not a problem. Polite pacing is used for any HTML-scrape augmentation.

Q: Output format?

A: JSON, JSONL, CSV, Excel via Apify dataset export. Schema is stable.

Q: Can I monitor only fresh posts?

A: Yes — schedule the actor with a sincePostId cursor or a sinceHours window and dedupe on post ID.

Schema Stability & Versioning

This actor follows NexGenData's additive-only schema contract:

• New fields may be added at any time — they will simply appear as new keys in the JSON output, defaulting to null for older runs.
• Existing fields are never renamed or removed without a major-version bump and an advance changelog notice.
• Field semantics (units, timezones, value-sets) are never silently changed — if we need to change semantics, we add a new field with the new name and deprecate (but keep) the old one for at least 90 days.

This means you can build production pipelines on this actor and not worry about a Tuesday breaking a Friday's ETL job. If you spot an unexpected change, reach out via the actor's Apify Issues tab and we'll look at it the same day.

Compliance & Legal

• The actor reads public, unauthenticated pages the same way a logged-out browser does.
• All requests route through Apify's compliant residential-proxy infrastructure with polite rate limiting.
• You are responsible for ensuring your downstream use complies with the target site's Terms of Service, your jurisdiction's data-protection laws (GDPR, CCPA, UK DPA, etc.), and any sector-specific rules (HIPAA, PCI, etc.).
• We do not collect, store, or transmit credentials for the target site.
• Most read-only competitive-intelligence and lead-generation use is widely accepted. Consult counsel before bulk redistribution.

Support

Open an issue on the actor's Apify Issues tab — the NexGenData team responds within one business day. For feature requests (new fields, new input filters), include the use case so we can prioritize on it.

About NexGenData

NexGenData publishes 200+ buyer-intent actors covering SEC filings, YC alumni, Delaware DOC, lead generation, competitive intelligence, stock fundamentals across 30+ exchanges, ATS job boards, real-estate marketplaces, and more. All actors are pay-per-result and share a stable, additive-only JSON schema. Browse the full catalog at https://apify.com/nexgendata?fpr=2ayu9b

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SEO: 🟧 Hacker News Show HN — Indie Startup Launch Tracker API