Hacker News Scraper – Stories, Comments, Search & Monitor

Get Hacker News data as clean JSON: the live front page, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN and job stories — or search 15+ years of HN stories and comments by keyword, date, points and author, with full comment threads. Built on the official Hacker News API and the Algolia HN Search API, so it is fast, complete and never blocked.

• 🔥 Live lists: top (front page) with rank, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs
• 🔎 Full-history search: stories, comments, Ask/Show HN, jobs, polls or front-page stories — by keyword, date range, minimum points/comments and author
• 💬 Comment threads: attach the nested discussion to each story (depth and size limits) — comments are free
• 🔔 Monitor mode: onlyNewItems returns only stories/comments you haven't seen before — perfect for brand mentions, competitor launches and topic alerts
• 📈 No 1,000-result cap for date-sorted searches: time-windowed paging gets every match
• 🧹 Clean fields: decoded text (no HTML entities), domain, story type (ask_hn, show_hn, launch_hn, job ...), ISO dates, HN permalink
• 💸 $0.50 per 1,000 items

Use cases

• Brand & competitor monitoring: schedule hourly searches for your product, company or competitors in stories and comments, get only new mentions
• Launch tracking: follow Show HN / Launch HN posts in your niche
• Trend research: what does HN think about Rust, Postgres, AI agents? Export years of stories with points and comment counts
• Content curation & newsletters: daily top stories with minimum points
• AI / NLP datasets: discussion threads for sentiment analysis, summarisation and RAG
• Hiring market research: aggregate monthly "Who is hiring?" job threads (company postings)

Pricing

Event	Price
Item returned (story or comment row)	$0.0005 ($0.50 per 1,000)

Comment threads attached to stories (includeComments) are included free. Example: the top 30 front-page stories with their discussions every day ≈ $0.45 per month. Monitor mode only charges for new items. Comparable HN Actors in the Apify Store charge about $0.0002–$0.005 per item (October 2026); few offer comment threads, monitoring and unlimited date-sorted search together.

Input examples

Front page with discussions:

{ "mode": "list", "lists": ["top"], "maxItems": 30, "includeComments": true, "maxCommentsPerStory": 50 }

Search stories about a topic with at least 100 points in the last year:

{ "mode": "search", "queries": ["postgres"], "searchIn": "stories", "minPoints": 100, "dateFrom": "1 year", "sort": "date", "maxItems": 500 }

Monitor new mentions of your brand in comments and stories (schedule hourly):

{ "mode": "search", "queries": ["yourbrand"], "searchIn": "all", "onlyNewItems": true, "stateStoreName": "yourbrand-hn" }

Output example

{
  "status": "ok",
  "source": "list:top",
  "id": 49977979,
  "type": "story",
  "rank": 1,
  "title": "Mistral Large 4",
  "url": "https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/",
  "domain": "mistral.ai",
  "text": "https://docs.mistral.ai/models/mistral-large-4-0",
  "author": "Philpax",
  "points": 1406,
  "numComments": 881,
  "createdAt": "2026-10-06T13:15:49.000Z",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977979",
  "comments": [
    { "id": 49978056, "author": "crimsoneer", "createdAt": "2026-10-06T13:22:07.000Z", "text": "Woah, this seems like a big deal…", "depth": 0 }
  ],
  "commentsIncluded": 2
}

Comment rows (search in comments) include storyId and storyTitle. Views: Stories and Comments. Export JSON, CSV, Excel, or use the API.

Notes

• Relevance sorting returns at most the top 1,000 matches per query (an Algolia limit); newest first has no such limit.
• Points and comment counts are live at the time of the run.
• Deleted and dead items are skipped.
• Data comes from the official public APIs (hacker-news.firebaseio.com and hn.algolia.com); no login, no HTML scraping. Usernames are public HN handles; please use the data responsibly and respect the HN community.

FAQ

How far back does search go? The whole history of Hacker News (2006 onwards).

Can I get every comment on a story? Yes — set includeComments with a high maxCommentsPerStory (up to 2,000) and maxCommentDepth.

How do I get alerts? Use monitor mode with a schedule and add a Slack/email/webhook integration on "Run succeeded".

Related Actors

• RSS Feed Reader & Monitor — monitor blogs and news sites the same way
• AI Web Scraper — extract structured data from the articles HN links to
• Website Screenshot & PDF — capture the linked pages