📰 Hacker News Scraper

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-05

Collect stories, comments, jobs, and user data from Hacker News without coding. Browse curated feeds or search with advanced filtering for points, comments, and date ranges. Extract nested comment threads with depth control and monitor tech industry trends. Perfect for competitive intelligence, trend analysis, and startup research.

The Hacker News Scraper collects stories, comments, and user data from top tech discussions with up to 15+ data fields, live comment threads, and karma scores.

✨ What Does It Do

• 📰 Story Title - Track breaking tech announcements and major releases shared by the community
• 🔗 Story URL - Capture original article links to analyze what the tech community is reading
• 💬 Comments - Extract nested comment discussions with configurable depth for conversation analysis
• 👤 Author Information - Identify key contributors and retrieve their karma scores for credibility assessment
• 📊 Points & Comments Count - Measure story popularity and engagement to find trending topics
• 📅 Timestamps - Sort content by creation date to track historical trends or find recent discussions

🔧 Input

• Mode - Choose between browsing curated feeds (Top, New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN, Jobs) or running full-text search with filters
• Feed Type - Select which feed to browse: Top Stories, New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN, or Jobs. Only used when mode is set to feed
• Search Query - Enter your search term for full-text search across Hacker News. Only used when mode is set to search
• Content Type - Filter results to stories only, comments only, or all content types
• Sort By - Sort search results by relevance or date. Newest first when sorted by date
• Minimum Points - Filter out stories below a certain point threshold to focus on popular content
• Minimum Comments - Only include stories with at least this many comments for discussion-rich content
• Date Range - Filter content by creation date using start and end dates in YYYY-MM-DD format
• Max Items - Set how many items to collect. Free accounts limited to 100, premium accounts up to 1,000,000
• Include Comments - Collect full comment threads for each story. Increases run time but adds conversation context
• Max Comment Depth - Control how deep into nested replies to collect, from 1 to 10 levels
• Max Comments Per Story - Limit the number of top-level comments to collect per story
• Include Author Info - Collect karma and account age for each author. Requires additional requests per author

Example input:

{
  "mode": "feed",
  "feedType": "top",
  "maxItems": 20,
  "includeComments": true,
  "maxCommentDepth": 2,
  "maxCommentsPerStory": 5
}

📊 Output

Each story or comment includes up to 15+ data fields. Download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

📝 Title	🔗 URL	🌍 Domain
👤 Author	📊 Points	💬 Comment Count
📅 Created At	🎯 Content Type	💡 Story Text
🔑 ID	🔗 HN URL	📋 Comments Thread
👥 Author Karma	📅 Author Created At	⏰ Scraped At

💎 Why Choose the Hacker News Scraper?

Feature	Our Actor	Similar Tools
Browse 6 feed types (Top, New, Best, Ask, Show, Jobs)	✔️	Partial
Full-text search with advanced filtering	✔️	Partial
Filter by points, comments, and date range	✔️	❌
Extract nested comment threads with depth control	✔️	❌
Author karma and account age enrichment	✔️	❌
Up to 1,000,000 results per run for premium accounts	✔️	❌
Export to CSV, Excel, or JSON format	✔️	✔️
No authentication required	✔️	✔️
Real-time data from Hacker News	✔️	Partial
Batch processing with smart rate limiting	✔️	❌
Content type filtering (stories, comments, jobs)	✔️	❌

📋 How to Use

No technical skills required. Follow these simple steps:

1. Sign Up - Create a free account at https://console.apify.com/sign-up?fpr=vmoqkp
2. Find the Tool - Search for "Hacker News Scraper" in the Apify Store and configure your input
3. Run It - Click "Start" and watch your results appear

That's it. No coding, no setup, no complicated configuration. Now you can export your data in CSV, Excel, or JSON format

🎯 Business Use Cases

• 📊 Tech Analyst - Monitor top stories from the last 24 hours with minimum 100 points to identify emerging technologies before competitors discover them
• 💼 Recruitment Manager - Collect all jobs postings weekly from the Jobs feed to benchmark competitor hiring and discover engineering talent pools
• 📈 Market Researcher - Search for AI-related discussions with 50+ comments, then extract comment threads to analyze sentiment and technical challenges in real time

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🎯	Built for the job. Scoped specifically to this data source so you skip the parser engineering entirely.
🔖	Structured output. Clean, typed fields ready for analysis, dashboards, or downstream pipelines.
⚡	Fast. Optimized request patterns return results in seconds, not minutes.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run pulls live data, so the dataset reflects the source as of run time.
🌐	No infra to manage. Apify handles proxies, retries, scaling, scheduling, and storage.
🛡️	Reliable. Battle-tested across many runs and edge cases, with graceful error handling.
🚫	No code required. Configure in the UI, run from CLI, schedule via cron, or call from any language with the Apify SDK.

📊 Production-grade structured data without the engineering overhead of building and maintaining your own scraper.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ Hacker News Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	Full source coverage	Live per run	Source-native filters supported	⚡ 2 min
Build your own scraper	Engineering hours	Full once built	Whenever you maintain it	Custom code	🐢 Days to weeks
Paid managed APIs	$$$ monthly	Vendor-defined	Live	Vendor-defined	⏳ Hours
Third-party data dumps	Varies	Subset, often stale	Periodic	None	🕒 Variable

Pick this Actor when you want broad coverage, server-side filtering, and no pipeline maintenance.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Hacker News Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Configure the input fields in the form (or paste a JSON), then set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

📊 Data & Analytics Build trend reports and dashboards from live source data Feed BI tools, warehouses, and ML pipelines with structured records Run periodic snapshots to track changes over time Compare segments, regions, or categories with consistent fields	🏢 Operations & Strategy Monitor competitor moves, pricing, and inventory shifts Build internal directories and lookup tools backed by current data Power workflows that depend on fresh source records Cut manual data-gathering time from hours to minutes
🎯 Marketing & Growth Identify market opportunities and trending topics Research target audiences and customer personas at scale Power lead-generation pipelines with verified records Track sentiment, reviews, or social signals over time	🛠️ Engineering & Product Prototype features that need real-world data without owning a crawler Replace fragile in-house scrapers with a managed Actor Wire datasets into your apps via the Apify API or webhooks Skip the proxy, retry, and parsing maintenance entirely

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Empirical datasets for papers, thesis work, and coursework Longitudinal studies tracking changes across snapshots Reproducible research with cited, versioned data pulls Classroom exercises on data analysis and ethical scraping	🎨 Personal and creative Side projects, portfolio demos, and indie app launches Data visualizations, dashboards, and infographics Content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters Hobbyist collections and personal trackers
🤝 Non-profit and civic Transparency reporting and accountability projects Advocacy campaigns backed by public-interest data Community-run databases for local issues Investigative journalism on public records	🧪 Experimentation Prototype AI and machine-learning pipelines with real data Validate product-market hypotheses before engineering spend Train small domain-specific models on niche corpora Test dashboard concepts with live input

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to run this actor?

No. You can start right now on the free Apify plan, which includes $5 in free monthly credit. That is enough to run this actor several times and explore the output before committing to anything. Paid plans unlock higher limits, more concurrent runs, and larger datasets. Create a free Apify account here to get started.

🚨 What happens if my run fails or returns no results?

Failed runs are not charged. If the source site changes, proxies get rate-limited, or a specific input matches nothing, re-run the actor or open our contact form and we will investigate. You can also check the run log in the Apify console to see why the run stopped.

📏 How many items can I scrape per run?

Free users are limited to 10 items per run so you can preview the output and confirm the actor works for your use case. Paid users can raise maxItems up to 1,000,000 per run. Upgrade here if you need full scale.

🕒 How fresh is the data?

Every run fetches live data at the moment of execution. There is no cache or delay: the records you get reflect what the source returned at that moment. Schedule the actor to maintain a rolling snapshot of the data you need.

🧑‍💻 Can I call this actor from my own code?

Yes. Apify exposes every actor as a REST endpoint and ships first-class SDKs for Node.js and Python. You can start a run, read the dataset, and handle webhooks from your own app in a few lines. All you need is your Apify API token.

📤 How do I export the data?

Every Apify dataset can be downloaded in one click from the console as CSV, JSON, JSONL, Excel, HTML, XML, or RSS. You can also pull results programmatically via the Apify API or stream them into BigQuery, S3, and other destinations through built-in integrations.

📅 Can I schedule the actor to run automatically?

Yes. Use the Apify scheduler to run the actor on any cadence, from hourly to monthly. Results are saved to your dataset and can be delivered to webhooks, email, Slack, cloud storage, or automation tools such as Zapier and Make.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

Hacker News Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe results into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh data into your product backend, or alert your team in Slack.

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💡 More ParseForge Actors

• Google News Scraper - Collect news stories and articles across multiple sources
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• Houzz Scraper - Collect home design ideas and interior trends
• LiveAuctioneers Scraper - Extract auction listings and item details
• Revzilla Scraper - Collect motorcycle gear and product information

Browse our complete collection of data extraction tools for more.

🚀 Ready to Start?

Create a free account and collect your first 100 results for free. No coding, no setup.

🆘 Need Help?

• Check the FAQ section above for common questions
• Visit the Apify support page for documentation and tutorials
• Contact us to request a new scraper, propose a custom project, or report an issue at Tally contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Hacker News or any of its subsidiaries. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

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