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

Get data from Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) as a clean table:

• Search stories, comments, Show HN, Ask HN, polls and YC job posts by keyword. Sort by newest or most relevant, and filter by points, comments and date.
• Front page: the stories on the HN front page right now, with points and comment counts.
• "Who is hiring?" job posts: every job post from the monthly Ask HN: Who is hiring? threads, with company, remote/onsite, visa sponsorship and salary pulled out of the post, plus the full text.

It uses the official Hacker News search API (run by Algolia for Y Combinator), so it's fast and reliable, with no blocking or proxies. It can go past the API's usual 1,000-result limit for large date-sorted exports.

Privacy-friendly: usernames are off by default and email addresses in posts are hidden.

Who is it for?

• Founders and marketers: track mentions of your product, competitors or market on HN, and find what launches went viral.
• Recruiters and job seekers: get every Who is hiring? post in a spreadsheet and filter by remote, Python, React or visa.
• Researchers and analysts: study tech trends, sentiment and discussions over the years.
• AI builders: collect high-quality tech discussions for summaries, newsletters and datasets.
• Newsletter writers: a daily digest of the top stories with Minimum points and Posted within 1 day.

How to use it

1. Choose What to get: search, front page or Who is hiring.
2. For search, type a query (e.g. web scraping), pick item types, and optionally set minimum points or a date range.
3. For jobs, optionally add job keywords (e.g. python, remote) and how many months of threads to read.
4. Click Start and export to Excel, CSV or JSON.

Input examples

{ "mode": "search", "query": "web scraping", "itemTypes": ["story"], "sortBy": "relevance", "minPoints": 50, "maxItems": 100 }

{ "mode": "whoIsHiring", "jobKeywords": ["python"], "hiringMonths": 1, "maxItems": 500 }

Output examples

A story:

{
  "id": "22180559",
  "type": "story",
  "title": "Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)",
  "url": "https://parsers.me/us-court-fully-legalized-website-scraping",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559",
  "points": 1057,
  "numComments": 388,
  "createdAt": "2020-01-29T14:06:37Z",
  "domain": "parsers.me"
}

A Who is hiring? job post:

{
  "type": "job-post",
  "thread": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)",
  "company": "Sidekick Labs",
  "headerParts": ["Senior SWE, R&D Engineer, Intelligence Engineer", "REMOTE"],
  "isRemote": true,
  "visaSponsorship": false,
  "salaryText": "$170k to $230k",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922609",
  "text": "Sidekick Labs | Senior SWE, R&D Engineer, ..."
}

How much does it cost?

Pay-per-event: a small fee per item returned plus a tiny per-run start fee, with no subscription and no separate platform usage costs. For example, 1,000 items cost about $0.30. Set Maximum cost per run to cap your spending.

Use it through the API, integrations or AI agents

Run it from the Apify API, on a schedule, or connect it to Make, Zapier, n8n, Slack or Google Sheets. AI agents can call it through the Apify MCP server.

FAQ

Is it legal? It uses the official, public Hacker News search API. Usernames are off by default and emails are hidden, so no personal data is collected unless you turn usernames on.

How accurate are the job fields? Company, remote, visa and salary are read from each post's text, so they're best-effort. The full text is always included.

Found a bug or need a feature? Open an issue. We usually reply within 24 hours.

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