Hacker News Scraper

Search Hacker News by keyword and date and export stories, Show HN, Ask HN, polls and comments with points, comment counts, authors and links. Grab the current front page, or collect full comment threads, using the official Hacker News search API.

What can this Hacker News scraper do?

• 🔎 Keyword search across all of Hacker News history.
• 📅 Date ranges and minimum points to find what mattered in a period.
• 🚀 Show HN, Ask HN, polls, comments, or everything.
• 🏠 Current front page with one click (leave search empty, choose "Current front page").
• 💬 Comment threads. Every comment under each story, with nesting depth.

Who uses it?

• Founders and marketers tracking mentions of their product or competitors.
• Researchers studying tech discussions and trends.
• Developers building datasets or newsletters from HN.

How to scrape Hacker News

1. Add search queries (or leave empty to list everything matching the filters).
2. Choose Content type and Sort by.
3. Optionally set From date, To date, Minimum points and Include comments.
4. Click Start and download the results.

Input example

{
    "searchQueries": ["web scraping", "apify"],
    "contentType": "story",
    "sortBy": "date",
    "dateFrom": "2026-01-01",
    "minPoints": 20,
    "maxItemsPerQuery": 200,
    "includeComments": true,
    "maxCommentsPerStory": 50
}

Output example

{
    "resultType": "story",
    "query": "web scraping",
    "id": "22180559",
    "type": "story",
    "title": "Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)",
    "url": "https://parsers.me/us-court-fully-legalized-website-scraping-and-technically-prohibited-it/",
    "author": "ehurynovich",
    "points": 1057,
    "numComments": 388,
    "createdAt": "2020-01-29T14:06:37Z",
    "isShowHN": false,
    "isAskHN": false,
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559"
}

Comment rows (resultType: "comment") include text, author, storyId, parentId and depth.

Use it from AI agents (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor)

AI assistants can run this Actor as a tool through Apify's MCP server. Add this server URL to any MCP client:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=rsiddiq95/hacker-news-scraper

Then just ask, for example: "What were the top Hacker News stories about AI agents this week?" Agent runs cost the same per result as runs from the console.

How much does it cost?

Pay per story or comment collected. See the Pricing tab. Searches with no results are free.

Limitations

• The HN search API returns at most 1,000 results per search. For more, split by date range.

FAQ

Is this an official source? Yes. It uses the Hacker News search API run by Algolia, the same one behind hn.algolia.com.

Something isn't working. Open an issue on the Issues tab with your input.