Hacker News Jobs & Who-Is-Hiring Scraper

Scrape Hacker News job postings into clean, structured JSON, CSV or Excel — with no API key, no login and no cookies. The actor covers the two places where HN hiring actually happens: the official HN jobs feed (YC-backed startup roles) and the legendary monthly "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread, where hundreds of companies post one job per comment.

Every posting is parsed into company, role, location, an is_remote boolean and a salary_hint — so you can filter, dedupe and pipe HN hiring data straight into a job board, an ATS, a newsletter or a spreadsheet, instead of scrolling 600 comments by hand.

How is this different from the hacker-news-scraper actor?

They are complementary, not duplicates:

	hacker-news-scraper	hn-jobs-scraper (this actor)
Target	HN stories — top / new / best / Ask HN / Show HN	HN jobs only
Sources	Front-page and story feeds	jobstories feed + "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" comment threads
Output	Story title, points, comments, author, URL	Job posting: company, role, location, remote flag, salary hint, full ad text
Parsing	None needed	Header-line parsing of the Company | Role | Location | REMOTE | Salary convention
Use it for	News monitoring, tech trends, link discovery	Job hunting, recruiting, hiring-market analysis

If you want the HN front page, use hacker-news-scraper. If you want jobs, use this one.

Modes

whoishiring (default)

Finds the newest "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" story automatically (posted on the 1st of every month by the whoishiring account), fetches its full comment tree and turns every top-level comment into one job record. A typical month yields 250–600 postings.

Most posters follow the community convention:

SmarterDx | 150-250k+ + equity + benefits | Remote (US only) | Multiple roles | https://smarterdx.com/careers

The actor splits that header into company / role / location, and falls back to em-dash headers (PrairieLearn (Remote US) — Full-Stack Software Engineer — TypeScript) for the ~10% who ignore the pipes. Nothing is invented: fields that are not present stay null.

jobstories

Reads the official HN jobs feed (news.ycombinator.com/jobs), which is reserved for YC-funded companies. Around 30 live posts at any time, e.g. "Bloomy (YC S26) is hiring a founding engineer" → company: "Bloomy", role: "founding engineer". The YC batch tag is stripped from the company name and kept in the title.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	whoishiring	whoishiring (monthly thread comments) or jobstories (official HN jobs feed)
maxItems	integer	200	Max job records to push. Max 2000.

{
  "mode": "whoishiring",
  "maxItems": 300
}

Output

{
  "source_mode": "whoishiring",
  "item_id": 48748003,
  "title": null,
  "headline": "SmarterDx | 150-250k+ + equity + benefits | Remote (US only) | Multiple roles | https://smarterdx.com/careers",
  "company": "SmarterDx",
  "role": "150-250k+ + equity + benefits",
  "location": "Remote (US only)",
  "is_remote": true,
  "salary_hint": "150-250k+",
  "text": "SmarterDx | 150-250k+ + equity + benefits | Remote (US only) ... SmarterDx builds clinical AI ...",
  "author": "justin_sdx",
  "posted_at": "2026-07-01T15:02:50.000Z",
  "score": null,
  "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48748003",
  "thread_title": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026)",
  "source": "hackernews",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T14:12:03+00:00"
}

In jobstories mode, title holds the HN post title, url points at the company's careers page when the post has one, and thread_title is null. All fields are nullable.

Use cases

• Tech job hunting — export every remote posting from this month's thread to CSV in one run, filter by is_remote and salary_hint, and apply before the thread scrolls away.
• Recruiting & sourcing — see which companies are hiring right now, for which roles, at which comp levels; build outbound lists of hiring managers who post their own ads.
• Startup hiring trends — track month over month how many YC startups hire, how remote-friendly the market is, and which stacks and titles are in demand.
• Job boards & aggregators — ingest HN hiring data on a schedule and republish it as a niche board or newsletter, with a stable item_id for deduplication.

Pricing

Pay per result: roughly $1 per 1,000 job records, plus Apify platform usage. A full month's "Who is hiring?" thread (~300 postings) costs about $0.30 and finishes in well under a minute.

Notes

• Only public, keyless endpoints are used: the official HN Firebase API and the HN Algolia Search API. No account, proxy or browser is required.
• Only top-level comments are treated as job postings — replies (questions, "is this remote?", recruiter spam) are ignored.
• The actor fails loudly with a RuntimeError if it scrapes zero jobs, so scheduled runs never silently return an empty dataset.
• Data is public content posted by HN users; you are responsible for how you use it.

Related actors

• Hacker News Scraper — HN stories, front page, Ask HN and Show HN
• RemoteOK Jobs Scraper — remote job listings with salary data
• Ashby Jobs Scraper — jobs from Ashby-powered career pages
• The Muse Jobs Scraper — curated company and job listings