Hacker News Scraper — search HN stories & comments as structured data

Search Hacker News and get back clean, structured data. Look up any keyword, company, domain, author, or topic and pull matching stories and comments — title, URL, author, points, comment count, date, and full text.

Fast and reliable: powered by the official Hacker News (Algolia) Search API — no browser, no blocking, no API key, no rate-limit headaches.

What you get

One dataset item per story:

{
  "type": "story",
  "objectId": "48852295",
  "title": "Show HN: I built an open-source alternative to X",
  "url": "https://example.com/project",
  "author": "pg",
  "points": 412,
  "numComments": 168,
  "createdAt": "2026-07-09T20:59:19Z",
  "text": null,
  "discussionUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48852295",
  "query": "open source",
  "status": "SUCCEEDED"
}

Or per comment (when searching comments):

{
  "type": "comment",
  "objectId": "48852338",
  "author": "dang",
  "text": "This is a great write-up. One thing to add…",
  "createdAt": "2026-07-09T21:10:02Z",
  "storyTitle": "Show HN: I built an open-source alternative to X",
  "storyUrl": "https://example.com/project",
  "commentUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48852338",
  "query": "open source",
  "status": "SUCCEEDED"
}

How to scrape Hacker News

1. Enter one or more search queries — a keyword, company name, domain, or topic.
2. Pick what to search: stories, comments, both, or Ask HN / Show HN posts only.
3. Optionally filter by author, minimum points, minimum comments, or a date range.
4. Click Start and export the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or pull it via API.

Results arrive in seconds. A typical query finishes in under 15 seconds.

Input

Field	Description
queries	One keyword search per line (company, domain, topic, technology…)
searchType	Stories, comments, both, or Ask HN / Show HN only
sortBy	Most recent, or most popular / relevant
maxItemsPerQuery	Cap per query (index returns up to 1,000 per search)
minPoints	Only items with at least this many points
minComments	Only stories with at least this many comments
author	Restrict to one Hacker News username
startDate / endDate	Restrict to a date range (YYYY-MM-DD)
proxyConfiguration	Optional — the API needs no proxy

Pricing

You pay a small fee per item delivered (story or comment) — $1.00 per 1,000 items plus a few cents of platform usage. Searches that return nothing, or that fail, are never charged. No subscriptions, no minimums.

Use cases

• Brand & product monitoring — track every time your company, product, or domain is posted or discussed on HN.
• Launch tracking — watch Show HN and Ask HN for your space, or see how a competitor's launch landed.
• Developer trend research — follow a technology or topic and measure how discussion changes over time.
• Sentiment & voice-of-community analysis — pull the full comment threads behind any story and run them through an LLM.
• Recruiting & lead research — find who's building or hiring in your niche via Who is hiring? threads and Show HN.
• Pipelines — schedule runs (e.g. hourly, last-24h) and pull results via the Apify API into your own alerts or dashboards.

Run it from your own code

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("originalvi/hacker-news-scraper").call(run_input={
    "queries": ["anthropic", "claude"],
    "searchType": "all",
    "sortBy": "byDate",
    "maxItemsPerQuery": 200,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["title"] if item["type"] == "story" else item["text"][:80])

Works the same with the JavaScript apify-client, raw HTTP API, or no-code tools (Make, Zapier, n8n).

FAQ

Does this use the official Hacker News API? Yes — the HN Search API operated by Algolia, the same one that powers hn.algolia.com. It's public, documented, and requires no key. That makes this scraper unusually fast and stable: no HTML parsing, no blocking.

How many results can I get per query? The search index returns up to 1,000 items per query. To go deeper on a broad term, split the run into date ranges with startDate / endDate — the Actor will happily fetch 1,000 per range.

Can I get all comments of one specific story? Search comments with the story's URL or title as the query, or filter by author for a specific user's comment history.

Can I monitor HN mentions of my company automatically? Yes — schedule the Actor (e.g. hourly) with sortBy: byDate and a webhook or the Apify API on the other end. Each run only costs what it returns.

Is scraping Hacker News allowed? The data comes from a public, official API that exists precisely so people can build tools on it. No login, no personal data beyond public usernames.

Tips

• Search your domain (yourcompany.com) as a keyword to catch every submission that links to you.
• Combine minPoints: 100 with sortBy: byDate and a schedule to build a "trending in my space" feed.
• Ask HN / Show HN mode is great for tracking launches and pain-point research — filter by minComments to find active discussions.

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Found a problem?

Open an issue on the Issues tab and I'll fix it fast — usually within a day.