Hacker News Scraper - Stories, Jobs & Comments

Pull stories, jobs and comments from Hacker News using the official HN API. Pick a list - Top, Newest, Best, Ask HN, Show HN or Jobs - or paste specific item IDs, and get clean rows with the title, link, score, author, comment count, date, domain and any self-text. No API key, no browser.

What you get per item

Field	Meaning
title / url / hnUrl	Headline, the external link, and the HN discussion link
score / commentCount	Points and number of comments (descendants)
author / createdAt	Submitter and submission time (ISO)
domain	The link's domain (e.g. github.com) - handy for trend analysis
itemType / text	story / job / comment / poll, and self-post or comment text
commentIds / parentId	Child comment IDs and (for comments) the parent

Input

{ "listType": "top", "maxItems": 100 }

• Story list - top, new, best, ask, show or job.
• Item IDs - or paste specific IDs (the number after id= in a news.ycombinator.com URL) to fetch exact items, including comments.
• Import from a file - paste a whole list of IDs, or link a public .txt/.csv, a Google Sheet/Drive link, or an Apify key-value-store record.
• Max items / Minimum score - bound and filter the run.
• Output fields - tick only the columns you want.

Leave everything empty and the run returns a small free sample so you can see the shape first.

Reliability

Reads the official Hacker News API - a public, unmetered Firebase endpoint. No key, no proxy, no anti-bot, nothing to get blocked. A run that returns nothing bills $0.

Honest limits

• Each list is the API's ordered list (Top/New/Best hold up to ~500 items; Ask/Show/Job are shorter). For more history, feed a range of item IDs.
• Comments are fetched by ID. Each item carries its child comment IDs (commentIds); to pull a full thread, feed those IDs back in. The actor does not auto-expand entire comment trees in one run.

Pricing

$0.001 per item on the FREE tier (tiered pricing lowers it with volume). You are only charged for items actually saved; an empty run costs nothing.

Output views

• Items - title, score, comments, author, domain, date and both links.

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

Available through the Apify MCP server - an agent can pull the current HN front page or Ask/Show HN with scores for monitoring or summarisation.

Agent-ready: autonomous payments (x402 & Skyfire)

This actor is agent-ready - AI agents can discover it, run it, and pay for it autonomously, with no Apify account and no human in the loop. It uses pay-per-event pricing and limited permissions, so it qualifies for Apify's agentic-payment standards:

• x402 - an open, HTTP-native payment protocol. Agents pay per run in USDC on the Base network directly through the Apify MCP server - no account, no API key.
• Skyfire - agent-to-service payments for fully autonomous AI-agent workflows.

Building an AI agent, MCP tool, or autonomous data pipeline? This scraper is ready to plug in and pay as it goes.