Hacker News Scraper

Scrape top stories from Hacker News (Y Combinator) — front page posts, Ask HN, Show HN, and the monthly "Who Is Hiring" thread. Extract titles, points, comment counts, authors, and timestamps as structured JSON. No API key required.

This actor uses CheerioCrawler for fast HTTP-based scraping, automatically paginates through results, and supports filtering and sorting so you get exactly the data you need. Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, or via API.

Features

• Scrape front page stories with automatic pagination
• Filter stories by minimum upvote threshold (minPoints)
• Sort results by points or comment count
• Automatic detection of Show HN, Ask HN, and standard story types
• "Who Is Hiring" mode to extract job postings from the monthly Ask HN thread
• Extracts story ID, title, URL, points, author, comment count, and timestamp
• No API key, authentication, or login required

Input

Configure the actor through the input schema. All fields are optional with sensible defaults.

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	Integer	30	Maximum number of stories to scrape
minPoints	Integer	0	Only include stories with at least this many points
sortBy	String	points	Sort order: points or comments
includeComments	Boolean	false	Include comment data (reserved for future use)
whoIsHiring	Boolean	false	Scrape the latest "Ask HN: Who is Hiring" thread for job postings

Example input

{
    "maxItems": 50,
    "minPoints": 100,
    "sortBy": "points",
    "whoIsHiring": false
}

Output

Results are stored in the default dataset and can be exported as JSON, CSV, Excel, or via API.

Story output (default mode)

{
    "id": "39482071",
    "title": "Show HN: A new way to build web apps",
    "url": "https://example.com/project",
    "points": 342,
    "author": "pg",
    "commentsCount": 128,
    "timeAgo": "2026-07-04T10:23:00",
    "isInternal": false,
    "type": "show_hn"
}

Job posting output (Who Is Hiring mode)

{
    "text": "Company Name | Senior Engineer | Remote | $120k-$180k...",
    "type": "job_posting"
}

Use cases

• Market research — track trending tech topics and discussions
• Lead generation — identify active founders, makers, and companies launching products via Show HN
• Job monitoring — extract job postings from the monthly Who Is Hiring thread
• Content discovery — surface viral stories and breaking news for newsletters or aggregators
• Sentiment analysis — feed story data into NLP pipelines to gauge developer community trends
• Competitive intelligence — monitor competitor launches and community reactions

How to use

1. Open the actor on the Apify Store.
2. Click Try for free or Start with Free Trial.
3. Adjust the input fields (max items, minimum points, sort order) — or leave defaults.
4. Click Start and wait for the run to complete.
5. Export the results to JSON, CSV, or connect via the Apify API.

For scheduled runs, use Apify's scheduler to scrape Hacker News daily or weekly and auto-export to your webhook, database, or Google Sheets.