🔥 Hacker News Topic Momentum Tracker

🚀 Find which Hacker News stories in your niche are gaining real momentum right now - and compare momentum across multiple topics at once. Enter one topic, or several comma-separated topics, and get stories ranked by engagement velocity - points and comments relative to age, not lifetime point totals. Built on the official HN Algolia Search API - no scraping, no breakage.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-07-07 · 📊 11 fields per momentum-ranked story · 🔥 Velocity ranking · ⚖️ Multi-topic comparison · 📊 Momentum labels · 🔓 No auth required

🎁 Try it free: the free Apify plan returns up to 10 results per run — enough to see the output quality. Any paid Apify plan unlocks full-size runs.

The Hacker News Topic Momentum Tracker finds what's actually gaining traction in a niche right now, not just what has the most all-time points. Enter any topic or keyword (or up to 5, comma-separated, to compare side by side) and the Actor queries the official HN Algolia Search API, computes an engagement-velocity score for every matching story from the last N days, and returns them ranked by momentum with a HOT/RISING/STEADY/COOLING label.

A 3-day-old story with 300 points is not automatically more relevant than a 1-hour-old story with 50 points and 40 comments - the second one is accelerating. Because each run tags every row with the topic it came from, comparing 'rust, zig, go' in one run shows you which language community is heating up fastest right now, not just each one's raw popularity. Results are flat JSON rows ready for CSV, Excel, or direct API consumption.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Founders, developer marketers, technical content writers, trend researchers, AI research agents	Emerging trend detection, competitive/market monitoring, cross-topic comparison, content timing

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📋 What Hacker News Topic Momentum Tracker does

One input, one run, a clean dataset:

• 🔥 Velocity ranking. Every story scored by (points + 2x comments) / hours since posted - not raw points.
• ⚖️ Multi-topic comparison. Compare momentum across up to 5 topics in one run - see which is accelerating fastest, not just each one's raw popularity.
• 🏷️ Momentum labels. HOT, RISING, STEADY, or COOLING - a scored read, not a raw number dump.
• 🔗 Direct discussion links. Every row includes the HN thread URL, ready to open.

💡 Why it matters: Hacker News' own "new" and "top" views don't separate genuinely accelerating discussions from stories that are just old and highly upvoted, and they don't let you compare topics side by side at all. Sorting by velocity - across one topic or several at once - surfaces what a niche (or a set of competing niches) is talking about right now, which is what matters for timing a launch, a blog post, or a competitive response.

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🎬 Full demo

🚧 Video walkthrough coming soon — the Quick Start below takes under 3 minutes end to end.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
query	string	"AI agents"	Topic, or comma-separated topics to compare (max 5).
daysBack	integer	14	How many days back to search (1-90).
maxResults	integer	20	Momentum-ranked stories to return per topic. Controls cost.

Example: track momentum on a single topic

{
  "query": "AI agents",
  "daysBack": 14,
  "maxResults": 20
}

Example: compare momentum across 3 topics

{
  "query": "rust, zig, go",
  "daysBack": 14,
  "maxResults": 10
}

⚠️ Good to know: Momentum is relative to the search window: a story from day 1 of a 14-day search has more time to accumulate points than one from day 13, so velocity (not raw points) is what makes the comparison fair. maxResults applies per topic - comparing 3 topics at maxResults=10 returns up to 30 rows total, priced per row.

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📊 Output

Each momentum-ranked story returns 11 fields. Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML, or consume via the Apify API.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🔑 query	string	"AI agents"
📰 title	string	"Why we built our AI agent framework from scratch"
🔗 url	string|null	"https://example.com/blog"
💬 hnDiscussionUrl	string	"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172033"
👤 author	string	"darthdeus"
⬆️ points	integer	245
💬 numComments	integer	87
⏱️ ageHours	number	18.5
🔥 velocityScore	number	14.2
🏷️ momentum	string	"RISING"
🕐 createdAt	ISO 8601	"2026-06-20T14:32:10.000Z"

📦 Sample record

{
  "query": "AI agents",
  "title": "Why we built our AI agent framework from scratch",
  "url": "https://example.com/blog",
  "hnDiscussionUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172033",
  "author": "darthdeus",
  "points": 245,
  "numComments": 87,
  "ageHours": 18.5,
  "velocityScore": 14.2,
  "momentum": "RISING",
  "createdAt": "2026-06-20T14:32:10.000Z"
}

---

✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
⚖️	Compares topics, not just one lookup. Up to 5 comma-separated topics in one run, each tagged in the output - see which is accelerating fastest.
🔥	Velocity, not vanity metrics. Ranks by engagement rate so a fast-rising new story doesn't get buried under an old, highly-upvoted one.
🏷️	Momentum labels. HOT/RISING/STEADY/COOLING give an instant read without doing the math yourself.
🔗	Ready-to-open links. Both the external URL and the HN discussion thread are included per row.
⚡	Built on the official HN Algolia Search API. Stable and durable — no breakage from page redesigns.
🔁	Automatic retries. Transient failures retry with backoff; errors are logged clearly, never silent.
💳	Pay per result. No subscription. A typical run costs $0.09 for a single topic (20 stories); $0.19 comparing 3 topics at 15 results each (45 rows).

📊 Hacker News surfaces thousands of new submissions a day across every technical niche. Sorting by velocity instead of scrolling /new or /best turns that firehose into a ranked shortlist in one run.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Setup
⭐ Hacker News Topic Momentum Tracker (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	Any topic or keyword indexed by HN's official search, across all Hacker News story history	Live per run	⚡ 2 min
hckrnews.com / HN newsletters	Free	Daily digest, not niche-specific	Daily	🐢 Not searchable by topic
Manual HN search + mental math	Free	Whatever you click through	One-shot	🐢 No velocity ranking
Manual copy-paste	Free	Current session only	One-shot	🐢 Hours of clicking

Pick this Actor when you want a momentum-ranked shortlist for one or several topics on demand - per run, not per scroll session.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free Apify account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Hacker News Topic Momentum Tracker page on the Apify Store.
3. ✏️ Set your input. Enter your topic or keyword in query — or just press Start, the prefilled example works.
4. 🚀 Run it. Watch results stream into the Dataset tab.
5. 📥 Download. Grab results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML — or pipe them anywhere via the Apify API.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3–5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

• 🚀 Founders - spot when a competitor space or technology is heating up on HN before it's obvious elsewhere.
• 📣 Developer marketers - time a launch post or comment to land while a related discussion is accelerating.
• ✍️ Technical writers - find genuinely rising topics to write about, not just evergreen high-point posts.
• 🤖 AI research agents - agent calls the Actor via MCP, screens multiple topics on a schedule, flags newly-HOT ones automatically.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows:

• 🎓 Research & academia — empirical datasets for papers and coursework; longitudinal studies across scheduled snapshots; reproducible, citable data pulls.
• 🎨 Personal & creative — side projects, dashboards, visualizations; content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters.
• 🤝 Non-profit & civic — transparency reporting, advocacy backed by public-interest data, community databases.
• 🧪 Experimentation — prototype AI/ML pipelines on real data; validate product hypotheses before engineering spend.

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🔌 Automating Hacker News Topic Momentum Tracker

Control this Actor programmatically for scheduled runs and pipelines:

Node.js (apify-client on NPM):

const { ApifyClient } = require('apify-client');
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('saint_person/hn-topic-momentum-tracker').call({
  "query": "AI agents",
  "daysBack": 14,
  "maxResults": 20
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Python (apify-client on PyPI):

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient('YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN')
run = client.actor('saint_person/hn-topic-momentum-tracker').call(run_input={
  "query": "AI agents",
  "daysBack": 14,
  "maxResults": 20
})
items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items

📚 Full Apify API documentation

Apify Schedules triggers this Actor on any cron interval — hourly for fresh monitoring, daily for feeds, weekly for historical datasets.

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🧠 Use via MCP (for AI agents)

Hacker News Topic Momentum Tracker is directly callable by any MCP-compatible AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and others) through Apify's hosted MCP server — no custom integration code needed.

Add this to your MCP client config (e.g. Claude Desktop's claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/sse?actors=saint_person/hn-topic-momentum-tracker",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

Once connected, just ask your agent something like: "Use the Hacker News Topic Momentum Tracker Actor to pull momentum-ranked story data for my target and summarize it." The agent reads the input schema automatically and calls the Actor directly — no manual dataset download step.

📚 Apify MCP server docs

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this Actor

Open a ready-to-send prompt in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Enter one topic, or up to 5 comma-separated topics, and click Start. For each topic, the Actor queries the official HN Algolia Search API for matching stories within the requested day range, computes a velocity score for each ((points + 2x comments) / hours since posted), sorts by that score, and returns the top results per topic with a momentum label - so comparing topics means comparing their ranked lists side by side in one dataset.

🔑 Do I need an HN account or API key?

No - the Actor works out of the box. The HN Algolia Search API is public and requires no authentication.

🔥 How is the momentum label calculated?

velocityScore = (points + 2 x numComments) / ageHours. >= 20 = HOT, >= 5 = RISING, >= 1 = STEADY, below 1 = COOLING. Comments count double because sustained discussion signals stronger engagement than a passive upvote.

🌐 Does this cover Ask HN / Show HN posts, not just link submissions?

Yes - any HN story matching your keyword is included, including text-only posts like Ask HN threads. For those, the url field is simply null since there's no external link.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval (hourly, daily, weekly).

⚖️ Is this data legal to collect?

This Actor only collects data that is publicly accessible through the official HN Algolia Search API, a public service run by Algolia in partnership with Y Combinator. No login, no bypass of access controls. You are responsible for complying with the source's Terms of Service and any regulations that apply to your use.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs. Paid plans unlock larger runs, scheduling, and higher concurrency.

🔁 What happens if a run fails?

Transient errors retry automatically with backoff. If a run still fails, the log explains exactly why, and partial results are preserved — you never lose progress.

🆘 What if I need help?

Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab — reliability is the whole point, and issues get fixed with priority. You can also request custom features or entirely new Actors there.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

Hacker News Topic Momentum Tracker connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Zapier — connect with 5,000+ apps
• Make — automate multi-step workflows
• n8n — self-hosted automation
• Google Sheets — export datasets to a shared sheet
• Slack — run notifications in your channels
• Gmail — email results automatically after each run
• Webhooks — trigger downstream pipelines
• MCP — let AI agents call this Actor directly

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🧩 Works even better together

Pair this Actor with a content or competitive-intelligence pipeline: track momentum here, then feed HOT/RISING topics into your own alerting, newsletter, or content calendar tooling. Run it on a daily Apify Schedule to catch topics the moment they start accelerating.

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💡 Pro tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more tools like this.

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🆘 Help & custom requests

• 🐛 Something not working? Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab — reliability is the whole point, and issues are fixed with priority.
• 🛠️ Need a custom feature, a different data source, or an entirely new Actor built for you? Open an issue describing what you need — custom builds are available.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Y Combinator (Hacker News). All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available data is collected.