🟧 Hacker News Items Scraper

🚀 Pull Hacker News stories in seconds. Production ready, real time data with no manual collection.

🕒 Last updated. 2026-05-27 · 📊 11 fields per record · Real time data · Public source

Scrape stories from Hacker News via the official Firebase API. Pull title, URL, score, author, comments count, time and story type from top, new or best stories for tech trend monitoring.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Data analysts	Build dashboards, monitor changes
Compliance teams	Risk screening and audit trails
Journalists	Investigative research and reporting
Developers	Pipe data into apps via Apify API

📋 What this Scraper does

• Connects to the official public source in real time
• Returns clean, deduplicated records
• Auto paginates through the upstream API or HTML feed
• Normalizes dates, identifiers and codes
• Outputs every record with a scrapedAt ISO timestamp
• Supports up to 1,000,000 items per run for paid users

💡 Why it matters. save engineering hours, get a clean dataset in one run.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon

⚙️ Input

{
  "maxItems": 10,
  "listing": "top"
}

⚠️ Good to Know. free plan runs are capped at 10 items as a preview. Upgrade to a paid plan to unlock up to 1,000,000 records.

📊 Output

Field	Type
id	text
title	text
url	text
score	text
by	text
descendants	text
time	text
type	text
sourceUrl	text
scrapedAt	text
error	text

✨ Why choose this Actor

• 100% public data, no auth required
• Standardized field naming across all ParseForge actors
• Real time, no cached output
• Pay per event pricing, pay only for actual records returned

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Alternative	Caveat
Manual collection	Slow, error prone
Build your own scraper	Maintenance burden
Hacker News Items Scraper	One click, always up to date

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free account w/ $5 credit
2. Open the Hacker News Items Scraper in the Apify Console
3. Fill the input or use the prefill
4. Click Start
5. Open the dataset in your spreadsheet tool of choice

💼 Business use cases

Competitive intelligence

Monitor changes to the upstream source on a daily schedule.

Research and journalism

Investigate trends with a structured dataset.

Compliance and due diligence

Use the output to feed risk screening pipelines.

Marketing and enrichment

Enhance your CRM with up to date public records.

🔌 Automating Hacker News Items Scraper

Trigger runs from Make, Zapier, n8n, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub Actions, Google Drive, AWS Lambda or any HTTP client through the Apify API.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Research

Academic studies on the upstream domain.

Personal projects

Build a personal dashboard or alert system.

Non profit

Civic tech, transparency and watchdog initiatives.

Experimentation

Train ML models on real world data.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Paste the input and output schema into ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity to design your downstream pipeline.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Do I need an account on the upstream source? A. No. The data is publicly available.

Q. How fresh is the data? A. Pulled at run time, so always current.

Q. Can I filter the output? A. Yes, see the Input section.

Q. Is this affiliated with the source? A. No. Independent tool.

Q. How many records can I extract? A. Free. 10 records. Paid. up to 1,000,000.

Q. Does it support pagination? A. Yes, fully automated.

Q. How is pricing handled? A. Pay per event, only for records returned.

Q. Can I schedule recurring runs? A. Yes, via Apify Schedules.

Q. Does it work with webhooks? A. Yes, Apify supports webhooks on run completion.

Q. Can I run from the Apify API? A. Yes, every actor is fully programmable.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Make, Zapier, n8n, Airbyte, Slack, Discord, Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, AWS, GCP, Azure, GitHub, Webhooks, REST API, MCP.

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💡 Pro Tip. browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer. independent tool, not affiliated with the upstream source. Only publicly available data is collected.