🟠 Hacker News Scraper - Story & Comment Search - RecordsData

🚀 The Hacker News Scraper is an Apify actor that searches 40M+ Hacker News stories and comments by keyword, with points, comment counts, dates and direct links. Filter by type (stories, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs, the live front page), minimum points and date range; sort by relevance or newest; and pull user profiles with karma. A search for "web scraping" returns 178 stories, the top one at 1,057 points, measured live. Export to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.

HN is where developer sentiment forms; this actor turns any topic into a ranked, dated dataset of what that community said about it.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
DevTool marketers and founders	Track every mention of your product or category
Investors and analysts	Developer sentiment on technologies over time
Recruiters	Who is hiring / who wants to be hired datasets
Researchers	Tech discourse corpora with engagement signals

📋 What the Hacker News Scraper does

• Story search: title, external URL, author, points, comment count, type, self-text and exact HN link for any query, deep-paginated.
• Type filters: stories, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs, polls, or the current front page.
• Signal filters: minimum points and date range, so you only pay for stories that mattered.
• Comment search: full-text across comments with author, parent story and date.
• User profiles: karma, about and account age per username.

💡 Why it matters: an HN front page appearance moves markets and traffic; this actor makes the whole archive queryable as data.

📊 Output of the Hacker News export

Real sample from a live run:

{
  "recordType": "story",
  "hnId": "27968148",
  "title": "Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)",
  "url": "https://example-source.com/article",
  "author": "ehurynovich",
  "points": 1057,
  "commentCount": 388,
  "storyType": "story",
  "createdAt": "2021-07-26T12:31:11Z",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27968148",
  "error": null
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML.

✨ Why choose this Hacker News scraper

• Stories + comments + users in one actor; alternatives cover stories only.
• Points and date filters to slice signal from 18 years of archive.
• Six post types including the live front page as a monitorable list.
• Official search API sourcing: fast, complete, no HTML parsing.

📈 How this Hacker News scraper compares to alternatives

Measured against the HN actors on the Apify Store (September 2026):

	This actor	The three alternatives
Comment search	Yes	No
User profiles	Yes	No
Min-points + date filters	Yes	Partial
Ask/Show/Jobs/front-page types	All	Usually one
Price per 1,000 stories	$5.50	$0.20-$5.00 with fewer capabilities

🚀 How to use the Hacker News Scraper

1. Create a free Apify account (with $5 of credit) at console.apify.com.
2. Open this actor's page and click Try for free.
3. Type a query and pick a story type and sort.
4. Optionally set minimum points, dates, comments and usernames.
5. Click Start and download CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.

💼 Business use cases

Brand monitoring

Every HN mention of your product, scored and dated.

Market research

What developers praised or trashed in any category, over years.

Hiring intelligence

Monthly Who-is-Hiring style datasets via job-type filters.

Content strategy

Which headlines about your topic reached the front page.

🔌 Automating the Hacker News Scraper

Connect to Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub or Google Drive: hourly mention alerts to Slack, weekly sentiment exports, or archive syncs to your warehouse.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

"I need every HN story about 'postgres' with 100+ points since 2023, plus matching comments, as CSV. Would the Hacker News Scraper on Apify (apify.com/recordsdata/hackernews-search-scraper) do this?"

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🟠 How far back does the archive go?

To Hacker News's start in 2007; date filters let you slice any window.

🔎 What does relevance sort mean?

The search index's blend of text match and popularity; switch to "newest first" for monitoring workflows.

💬 Do comment rows include their story?

Yes, each comment carries its parent story title and ID for joining.

⚖️ Is this allowed?

The actor uses the official public HN Search API (by Algolia) within its generous limits.

🆓 Can I try it for free?

Yes, free users get a 10-row preview. Paid Apify plans unlock full runs.

Found a bug or missing field? Open the Issues tab on this actor's page. Custom solutions available on request.