Hacker News Scraper — Who Is Hiring Jobs + HN Search

Claude / Codex skill to describe and setup this actor: SKILL.md

Parse the famous monthly “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” thread (and the sibling “Who wants to be hired?” and “Freelancer?” threads) into one structured job record per top-level comment — or full-text search all of Hacker News by keyword (searchQuery) to track any topic, product or company mention. Optionally add clean, LLM-extracted company / role / salary / tech-stack / remote / visa fields — extracted honestly (null when the prose doesn't say), not guessed with regex — and a one-row AI trend digest summarizing the whole thread.

What Hacker News Who is Hiring data does this scraper extract?

Published postings follow nomad-agent-job-row-v1. The shared fields carry source identity, title and company, parsed locations, dates, the complete plain-text body when available, source markup when usable, and work type. Unavailable scalar facts are null; no parsed location is []. Source-only facts appear in versioned custom.data only when mapped there. See the Output example section for the exact dataset fields and diagnostic rows.

company and location are best-effort, not curated. Both are parsed from the community's Company | Role | Location pipe convention, which most posters don't follow — so both are null, or a fragment of the opening sentence, far more often than not. The reliable field is description: the complete comment body, uncapped. Parse it downstream however your pipeline needs.

title is raw, not curated. HN "Who is hiring" posts are freeform comments, not structured job listings — title is just the first 80 characters of the comment text, truncated mid-sentence with …. Don't expect a clean job title like you'd get from a real ATS; expect the opening of whatever the poster typed.

company and location depend on an unenforced convention. Many (not all) commenters format their first line as Company | Role | Location | Remote | ..., in roughly that order — but the order and field count vary by poster, and plenty of posts are pure prose with no | at all. company takes everything before the first | (or the whole first 80-ish characters when there's no |, which can look messy). location requires at least 3 pipe-separated segments and treats the 3rd one as the candidate, keeping it only if it's short, isn't a URL, and isn't an obvious comma-packed tag list. When a post doesn't follow the convention, or the 3rd segment doesn't look location-shaped, location is null — this is expected for a large share of postings, not a bug.

How to scrape Hacker News Who is Hiring with this Actor

1. Click Try for free / Run — no login to the target site, no cookies, no proxies to configure.
2. Adjust the input (keyword, filters, maxItems) or keep the defaults.
3. Run it and export the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it over the API.

Run it from your own code:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("nomad-agent/hackernews-scraper").call(run_input={"maxItems": 50})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["title"], "—", item["company"], item["url"])

Or a single HTTP call that runs the Actor and returns items in one response:

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nomad-agent~hackernews-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"maxItems": 50}'

Integrations

Send results straight to Google Sheets, Slack, Make, Zapier or any webhook via Apify integrations — no code required, or pull the dataset over the API.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
threadType	string	hiring	Which monthly thread to scrape: hiring (Who is hiring?), seeking (Who wants to be hired?), or freelancer (Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?). Ignored when searchQuery is set.
searchQuery	string	—	Full-text search all of HN (via the official Algolia HN Search API) instead of the monthly thread — e.g. rust remote, your product name. Newest first, up to 1000 matches per run. See "Full-text HN search" below.
searchScope	string	all	With searchQuery: search all (stories + comments), stories only, or comments only.
keyword	string	—	Case-insensitive substring match on the full comment text (e.g. remote, rust). Non-matching comments are dropped before billing.
maxItems	integer	100	Maximum number of job postings to return. Set 0 for no limit.
postedWithin	string	any	Keep only jobs published inside this window. Use any for no date filter, or a duration — 1h, 24h, 3d, 2w, 6m. Jobs the source published no date for are kept rather than dropped. Replaces maxAgeHours, still accepted for existing integrations.
cacheTtlSeconds	integer	1800	Cache the upstream thread lookup for this many seconds; re-runs within the window skip the network call. Set 0 to disable. "Advanced".

Full-text HN search (searchQuery)

Set searchQuery to search every story and comment on Hacker News (via the official Algolia HN Search API) instead of scraping the monthly hiring thread — track mentions of your product, a competitor, a technology, or find job posts outside the official thread:

{"searchQuery": "founding engineer", "searchScope": "all", "postedWithin": "7d"}

• Results come newest first, up to 1000 per run (the API's ceiling) — bound recency with postedWithin.
• Records keep the exact same shape as thread mode (so exports and integrations don't change), plus search-only fields: itemType (story/comment), author, points, numComments, and externalUrl (the article a story links to).
• keyword still applies as an extra substring filter on top of the search relevance.

Three monthly threads

HN's whoishiring bot posts three threads on the 1st of each month. Pick which with threadType:

• hiring — Ask HN: Who is hiring? (companies posting jobs — the default)
• seeking — Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (candidates advertising themselves)
• freelancer — Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?

Output example

Every row follows nomad-agent-job-row-v1, the one shape shared by all of this fleet's job Actors. A row carries every field; null means the source did not publish that fact, and locations: [] means no usable location was parsed from the posting. Nothing is guessed.

{
  "schemaVersion": "nomad-agent-job-row-v1",
  "recordType": "posting",
  "source": "hackernews",
  "id": "a1b2c3",
  "url": "https://example.com/hackernews/jobs/a1b2c3",
  "title": "Senior Backend Engineer",
  "company": "Example Company",
  "locations": [
    "Bilbao",
    "Spain"
  ],
  "postedAt": "2026-09-02T00:00:00Z",
  "deadline": null,
  "description": "The complete posting body as plain text, exactly as the source published it — never truncated.",
  "descriptionHtml": "<p>The complete posting body as the source's own markup.</p>",
  "workType": null,
  "custom": {
    "schemaId": "nomad-agent-job-custom-hackernews-v1",
    "data": {
      "threadType": "…",
      "threadId": "…",
      "itemType": "…"
    }
  }
}

Field	Meaning
schemaVersion	Always "nomad-agent-job-row-v1".
recordType	"posting" for a job, "diagnostic" for a row reporting something about the run itself.
source	Which job source the posting came from, from the collector registry's vocabulary — not the Actor name.
id	Stable identifier for the posting within source.
url	Canonical public URL of the posting on the source site.
title	Job title exactly as the source publishes it, untruncated.
company	Employer name as published.
locations	Places the role is based, most specific first — e.g. ["Bilbao", "Spain"].
postedAt	When the source published the posting, ISO-8601 UTC (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ).
deadline	Closing date for applications as an ISO-8601 calendar date (YYYY-MM-DD).
description	The complete posting body as plain text — never truncated, never summarised.
descriptionHtml	The posting body as the source's own markup, preserving lists, headings and links.
workType	Working arrangement: "remote", "hybrid" or "onsite".
custom	Facts only this source publishes, as {"schemaId", "data"}.

A run also emits diagnostic rows — recordType: "diagnostic" with a warnings array — when it has something to report, such as a source returning nothing. They are never billed and are easy to filter out on recordType.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.005 per Actor start and $0.002 per result returned (less on paid Apify plans — down to $0.0016 with store discounts). 100 results ≈ $0.21. No subscription, no rental — you pay only for what you fetch.

Use cases

• Tracking startup and YC-adjacent hiring monthly
• Feeding job boards with hard-to-find startup roles
• Sourcing engineering-heavy openings before they hit job boards
• Hiring-trend analysis on HN data, from the full comment text of every posting
• Brand / competitor / product mention monitoring across all of HN by comparing scheduled searchQuery snapshots downstream
• Research on any HN topic: keyword search over every story and comment, exported as JSON/CSV

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape Hacker News Who is Hiring? This Actor reads only publicly available job postings — data any visitor can see without logging in. No personal data behind authentication is touched. Review the target site's terms and your local regulations for your specific use case.

Do I need an account on the target site? No. Postings are fetched from public pages/APIs — no login, cookies or session tokens.

How fresh is the data? Every run fetches live listings. Results are cached for cacheTtlSeconds (default 30 min, set 0 to always hit the source live).

How many jobs can I get? maxItems caps the run (set 0 where supported for no cap). Most sources paginate from newest to oldest.

Something broken or missing? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab — it is monitored and reliability fixes ship fast.

Is this Actor useful to you? A quick ⭐ review on the Actor's Reviews tab helps other Hacker News hiring watchers find it — and tells us what to build next.

Related Actors

• Y Combinator Jobs Scraper — Work at a Startup
• Web Developer Jobs Scraper — 10 Boards in One
• AI & ML Engineer Jobs Scraper — 8 Boards in One

---

From the maker of Oink — an open-source, AI-powered job-search bot for Telegram that runs on these Actors. Try the free bot, get a managed instance at oinkjobsearch.com, or browse the full catalog of 50+ Actors.