📰 Hacker News Scraper

🚀 Export Hacker News stories, scores, rankings, and metadata in seconds. No account, no API key, no limits on your end.

The Hacker News Scraper pulls live story data from the official Hacker News Firebase API - the same source powering the HN website itself. Every run returns fresh, real-time data: story titles, URLs, scores, author handles, comment counts, post timestamps, and source domains. No HTML scraping, no fragile selectors - pure API data.

Hacker News surfaces the tech industry's most relevant links, discussions, and job postings daily. With this actor you can monitor trends, track viral stories, analyze community sentiment, or build content pipelines - all without writing a single line of code.

Coverage: Up to 500 stories per list type (top, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN, Jobs). All fields come directly from the Firebase API - scores and comment counts are live at scrape time.

🎯 Target Audience / Use Cases

Who	What they get
Tech journalists and bloggers	Daily trending stories to inspire or cover
Startup founders	Signal on what the developer community cares about
Data scientists and researchers	Time-series of story performance and community engagement
Content marketers	High-signal content ideas from the tech community
Developers and indie hackers	Show HN and Ask HN submissions for inspiration
Recruiters	Job postings from HN's who-is-hiring threads

📋 What the Hacker News Scraper does

• Fetches the ranked list of story IDs for your chosen list type (top / new / best / ask / show / job)
• Retrieves full item details for each story in parallel batches
• Extracts all key metadata: title, URL, score, author, comment count, rank, type, domain
• Converts Unix timestamps to ISO 8601 strings for easy downstream use
• Extracts clean domain names (e.g. github.com) from story URLs
• Caps output at your requested maxItems so you never pay for more than you need
• Pushes structured JSON records to the Apify dataset - ready for CSV, Excel, or API export

💡 Why it matters: Hacker News consistently surfaces high-quality technical content days or weeks before it trends elsewhere. Monitoring HN programmatically gives you an early-signal advantage over manual browsing.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: author, commentCount, domain, id, postedAt, rank, score, scrapedAt, title, type, url. All 11 field names come from a real production run, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ Good to Know: The Hacker News Firebase API returns up to 500 story IDs per list type. Setting maxItems above 500 will return all available stories for that list. Scores and comment counts reflect the moment of scraping - run again for updated numbers.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account - includes $5 credit
2. Open the Hacker News Scraper actor page on Apify Store
3. Select a Story Type (top, new, best, ask, show, or job)
4. Set Max Items (10 for a preview, up to 500 for a full list)
5. Click Start and wait a few seconds
6. Download your dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for scrapers covering 100+ websites across tech, finance, jobs, and more.

This actor uses the official public Hacker News Firebase API (https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/). It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator or Hacker News. Use responsibly and in accordance with Hacker News terms of service.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.