Hacker News Scraper — Stories & Comments Search

Search Hacker News and get clean JSON. Query stories, comments, Show HN, Ask HN or the front page by keyword and get back a tidy row per hit: title, URL, author, points, comment count and dates. Powered by the official HN Algolia API — no anti-bot, no key.

AI-agent ready: this Actor is callable and payable by AI agents via x402 (USDC on Base), no Apify account required.

Turn Hacker News into a structured dataset for research, monitoring, sentiment analysis and trend-tracking.

Who uses this

• 📈 Founders & marketers — monitor mentions of your product, competitors or topics.
• 🔎 Researchers & analysts — build datasets of tech discussions and sentiment.
• 🤖 AI / LLM pipelines — feed HN stories and comments to your models.
• 📰 Trend watchers — track what's rising on the front page and in Show/Ask HN.
• 🧑‍💻 Developers — a clean HN search endpoint without touching the raw API.

What you get — one clean row per hit

Field	Description
title	Story / item title
url	Linked article URL
author	HN username
points	Score
numComments	Comment count
createdAt	Post date
storyText / commentText	Text body (Ask HN, comments)
tags	HN item tags
hnUrl	Link to the HN discussion
id, query, scrapedAt	Identifiers & provenance

Example

Input

{ "queries": ["ai agents", "rust"], "tag": "story", "minPoints": 50, "sortByDate": false, "maxResultsPerQuery": 100 }

Output (one item)

{
  "id": "38765432",
  "title": "Show HN: I built an open-source AI agent framework",
  "url": "https://github.com/example/agent",
  "author": "pg",
  "points": 412, "numComments": 137,
  "createdAt": "2026-07-13T14:05:00Z",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38765432"
}

Why this scraper

• ✅ Official source — the Hacker News Algolia API, always current.
• 🔎 Search everything — stories, comments, Show HN, Ask HN, polls, front page.
• 🎯 Filter that matters — by minimum points, and sort by date or relevance.
• ⚡ Fast & affordable — pay only per hit returned. No anti-bot, no key.
• 🧹 Clean output — normalized JSON, ready for Sheets/Excel/your database.

Input options

• queries (required) — keywords (one search per query).
• tag — story, comment, poll, show_hn, ask_hn or front_page.
• sortByDate — newest first (true) vs by relevance (false).
• minPoints — only items with at least this many points.
• maxResultsPerQuery — cap hits per query (default 100).

FAQ

Stories or comments? Both — set tag to story, comment, show_hn, ask_hn, poll or front_page.

Can I filter by popularity? Yes — set minPoints to only get items above a score.

Newest or most relevant? Your choice — toggle sortByDate.

How fresh is the data? Live from the HN Algolia API on every run.

Can I export to CSV/Excel/Google Sheets? Yes — the dataset exports to JSON, CSV, Excel and HTML, or pull it via the API.

What does it cost? Pay-per-hit — you're only charged for items actually returned.

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Tip: schedule a keyword search daily to monitor when your product or topic hits the HN front page.