Hacker News Scraper – Stories, Comments & Who Is Hiring Jobs

Hacker News scraper: search stories and comments by keyword, points and date, get top/new/best/Ask HN/Show HN/job lists, full comment threads (flattened with depth and parentId), user profiles and parsed 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?' job posts. Official HN APIs, no login.

Price: $0.20 per 1,000 items. No login, no API key, no browser. Empty searches and invalid inputs are never charged.

What data do you get?

• 📰 Stories: title, URL, domain, points, comment count, author, date, HN link, Ask/Show HN text, list rank
• 💬 Comments: plain text (HTML decoded, links expanded), author, date, storyId, storyTitle, parentId, depth (1 = top-level, 2 = reply …)
• 🧵 Threads: story plus all comments in Hacker News order, depth-first, with optional depth/size limits
• 💼 Who is hiring job posts: company, location, remote / hybrid / onsite, roles[], employmentType[], salary, visaSponsorship, applyUrl, urls[], full text, thread month
• 👤 Users: karma, account creation date, bio (contact details removed), submission count, recent submission IDs

Data comes from the two official Hacker News APIs: the Algolia HN Search API (search, full threads) and the HN Firebase API (live front-page lists, items, users).

Use cases

• Tech trend and brand monitoring: track every mention of your product, competitors or a technology, sorted by date.
• Recruiting and job-market research: each month, export all "Who is hiring?" posts as a spreadsheet and filter by remote, salary, Rust, Python, Berlin and so on.
• Sentiment and NLP datasets: download whole discussion trees with parent/child structure for analysis or fine-tuning.
• Content research: find the highest-scoring posts on any topic and see what the community said.
• AI agents and RAG: give an LLM fresh, structured HN discussions on demand.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free or Start.
2. Choose a Mode: search, list, item, whoIsHiring or user.
3. Fill in the fields for that mode (each field says which mode it applies to) and set Max items.
4. Click Start, then export as JSON, CSV or Excel or connect via API, Make, Zapier, n8n or Google Sheets.

Input

Field	Mode	Description
mode	all	search (default), list, item, whoIsHiring, user
searchQuery	search	Keywords, e.g. AI agents. Empty = browse by filters.
searchType	search	story (default), comment, ask_hn, show_hn, job, poll, front_page, all
sortBy	search	relevance (popular first, max 1,000) or date (newest first, no cap)
minPoints, minComments	search, list	Minimum points / comments
onlyNewerThan	search, list	2026-01-01 or 7 days, 1 month …
author	search	Only items by this username
listType	list	top, new, best, ask, show, job
itemIds	item	IDs or news.ycombinator.com/item?id=… URLs
includeComments	search, list	Also return each story's comments
maxCommentsPerStory	search, list, item	Default 100, 0 = all
maxCommentDepth	search, list, item	1 = top-level only, 0 = unlimited
hiringMonth	whoIsHiring	YYYY-MM. Empty = latest thread
hiringKeyword	whoIsHiring	Only posts containing all these words, e.g. rust remote
remoteOnly	whoIsHiring	Only remote-friendly posts
usernames	user	Usernames or profile URLs
maxItems	all	Total item limit (= cost cap). Default 100

Example inputs:

{ "mode": "search", "searchQuery": "postgres", "sortBy": "date", "minPoints": 50, "onlyNewerThan": "30 days" }

{ "mode": "whoIsHiring", "hiringKeyword": "python", "remoteOnly": true, "maxItems": 300 }

{ "mode": "item", "itemIds": ["https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863"], "maxCommentDepth": 2 }

Output

Every item has a type: story, comment, job, poll, job-post, user or error (free). This is real output (shortened):

Story (mode list)

{
    "type": "story",
    "id": 49991227,
    "title": "Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome",
    "url": "https://developer.chrome.com/blog/jpeg-xl-in-chrome",
    "domain": "developer.chrome.com",
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49991227",
    "text": null,
    "author": "AshleysBrain",
    "points": 397,
    "numComments": 254,
    "createdAt": "2026-10-07T11:25:02.000Z",
    "storyId": 49991227,
    "parentId": null,
    "depth": 0,
    "rank": 6,
    "listType": "top",
    "tags": ["story"]
}

Comment (thread, flattened)

{
    "type": "comment",
    "id": 49995760,
    "text": "There are lots in there with proper ASCII check out https://ascii.rest/julia-set/ for example",
    "author": "elevaet",
    "createdAt": "2026-10-07T17:13:42.000Z",
    "storyId": 49993857,
    "storyTitle": "Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages",
    "storyUrl": "https://ascii.rest/",
    "parentId": 49995373,
    "depth": 2,
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49995760",
    "links": ["https://ascii.rest/julia-set/"]
}

Who is hiring job post

{
    "type": "job-post",
    "id": 49995549,
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49995549",
    "company": "Mastra",
    "location": "REMOTE (AMER or EMEA time zones)",
    "remote": true,
    "hybrid": null,
    "onsite": null,
    "roles": ["AI Engineer"],
    "employmentType": ["full-time"],
    "salary": null,
    "visaSponsorship": null,
    "applyUrl": "https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mastra/531a3fe8-556f-4b83-bee7-20374f67f980",
    "urls": ["https://github.com/mastra-ai/mastra", "https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mastra/531a3fe8-…"],
    "text": "Mastra | AI Engineer | REMOTE (AMER or EMEA time zones) | Full-time\nMastra is the open-source TypeScript framework for building AI agents …",
    "author": "RitaSand",
    "createdAt": "2026-10-07T16:59:27.000Z",
    "numReplies": 0,
    "threadId": 49922569,
    "threadTitle": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)",
    "threadMonth": "October 2026"
}

User

{ "type": "user", "id": "pg", "karma": 157316, "createdAt": "2006-10-09T18:21:32.000Z", "text": "Bug fixer.", "submittedCount": 15565, "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg" }

How "Who is hiring" parsing works: the Actor finds the latest (or chosen month's) thread posted by whoishiring and reads every top-level comment. It splits the Company | Role | Location | Remote | Salary | URL header that most posts use, falls back to labeled lines such as Location: and Salary: in the body, and detects remote/hybrid/onsite, employment type, visa sponsorship and salary ranges in USD, EUR, GBP and other currencies. Funding amounts like "raised $42M" are ignored. Meta comments that aren't job posts are skipped and not charged. Parsing is heuristic. On the October 2026 thread (239 top-level comments), 227 were classified as job posts. Of those, 96% had a location detected, 86% a remote/onsite flag, 86% an apply link, 77% roles and 30% a salary (which matches how often posts state one). The full original text is always included.

Dataset views in Apify Console: Overview, Who is hiring, Users, Errors.

Pricing

Pay per event, with platform usage included.

Event	Price	When it is charged
item	$0.0002 per item ($0.20 / 1,000)	Each story, comment, job post or user saved
Errors / no results	Free	Invalid IDs, missing users, empty searches

Job	Cost
Top 30 front-page stories	$0.015
One month of "Who is hiring?" (~250 posts)	~$0.13
A 500-comment thread	$0.25
10,000 search results	$5.00

Set Max items and Apify's Max cost per run. The Actor stops cleanly at the limit.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Add the Actor as a tool in the Apify MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com?tools=openharvest/hacker-news-scraper), or let agents find it with search-actors ("hacker news").

Example call-actor input for "What is HN saying about the new Rust release?":

{
    "mode": "search",
    "searchQuery": "rust release",
    "sortBy": "date",
    "onlyNewerThan": "14 days",
    "includeComments": true,
    "maxCommentsPerStory": 20,
    "maxItems": 60
}

Example input for "Find remote Python jobs from this month's Who is hiring":

{ "mode": "whoIsHiring", "hiringKeyword": "python", "remoteOnly": true, "maxItems": 100 }

FAQ

Is there a limit on search results? Algolia returns at most 1,000 results per query in relevance order. With sortBy: "date" the Actor pages back in time past that limit, so you can collect complete history for a keyword.

Why do comments from search not have depth? Search returns individual comments without their position in the tree (depth: null, but parentId and storyId are set). Use mode item or includeComments to get the full thread with depths.

In which order are thread comments returned? Top-level comments follow Hacker News's own ranking. Replies come right after their parent, depth-first, so a thread reads like it does on the site.

Does it include dead or deleted comments? No. Dead and deleted comments are skipped, but their replies are kept.

Can it parse "Who wants to be hired?" threads? No. Those posts are written by individuals and contain personal contact details, so the Actor only parses company "Who is hiring?" posts.

How fresh is the data? Lists, items and users come live from the official Firebase API. Search and threads come from Algolia, which typically indexes new items within a minute or two.

Is it legal to scrape Hacker News?

The Actor only uses Hacker News's official public APIs (Algolia HN Search and the HN Firebase API, both provided for public use) and only reads public posts. It does not log in. User bios are returned with emails and phone numbers removed, and the Actor does not harvest contact data. Posts are written by HN users. Respect their rights and the Hacker News guidelines, and comply with applicable laws such as GDPR when you process the data. Do not use the data for spam or unsolicited outreach.

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Support & feedback

Found a bug or a missing field? Open an issue in the Issues tab and we usually reply within a day.