Hacker News Front-Page Scraper

Collect every article's title, score, author, age, and URL from the Hacker News front page in seconds — no browser required.

What does this Actor do?

This Actor fetches the Hacker News front page and extracts the top stories using a fast, lightweight HTTP crawler (Cheerio). For each story it captures:

Field	Description
rank	Position on the front page (1-based)
id	HN item ID
title	Story headline
url	Link to the article
domain	Domain shown beneath the title
score	Number of upvote points
author	HN username of the submitter
ageText	Relative age string (e.g., "4 hours ago")
ageTimestamp	ISO 8601 timestamp of submission
commentsCount	Number of comments
commentsUrl	Direct link to the HN discussion
scrapedAt	ISO 8601 timestamp of when the record was scraped

Input

{
    "maxItems": 30
}

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	30	Maximum stories to collect (1–30). HN shows ≤30 stories per page.

Output example

[
    {
        "rank": 1,
        "id": "49170165",
        "title": "Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones",
        "url": "https://toneyalexander.github.io/inclusive-color-space/",
        "domain": "toneyalexander.github.io",
        "score": 288,
        "author": "automatoney",
        "ageText": "4 hours ago",
        "ageTimestamp": "2026-08-04T15:16:22",
        "commentsCount": 67,
        "commentsUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170165",
        "scrapedAt": "2026-08-04T19:00:00.000Z"
    }
]

Limitations

• Scrapes only the current front page (≤30 stories). Paginated pages (/news?p=2) are not fetched.
• Job listings and special posts (e.g., "Hiring") often have no score, author, or comments count — those fields will be null.
• Score and comment counts change constantly; each run reflects a point-in-time snapshot.
• Hacker News does not provide an API for front-page items in this format, so the Actor scrapes HTML directly. Structural changes to HN's markup may require selector updates.

Running locally

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Build TypeScript
npm run build

# Run the Actor (reads input from storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json)
apify run

# Or purge previous storage first
apify run --purge

Results are saved to storage/datasets/default/ as newline-delimited JSON.