Hacker News Scraper: Search, Brand Monitoring & Who Is Hiring

Search Hacker News stories and comments by keyword, domain or brand with points and date filters, grab the front page, or extract every job post from the monthly 'Who is hiring?' thread with company, remote flag and parsed header fields. Uses the official HN Algolia API.

Why this actor

• Three use cases in one actor (search, front page, Who is hiring) at a mid price; parsed hiring posts.
• Pay only for results: $1.00 per 1,000 items, no start fee, failed lookups are free.
• Robust: automatic retries with exponential backoff, respects Retry-After, per-item error rows instead of crashed runs.
• Clean, flat JSON/CSV/Excel output ready for Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n, Clay, or the Apify API.

Use cases

• Brand / launch monitoring for dev-tool companies
• Recruiters mining monthly 'Who is hiring?' posts
• Trend research for founders and VCs
• Dataset building for ML

Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	string	What to extract.
queries	array	Keywords, brand or domain names to find in stories/comments.
tags	string	Search stories, comments, both, Show HN or Ask HN.
sortBy	string	Newest first, or most relevant.
minPoints	integer	Only items with at least this many upvotes.
sinceDays	integer	Only items from the last N days (great for daily alerts).
maxResultsPerQuery	integer	Cap per query.
hiringThread	string	Which monthly thread.
keywords	array	Keep job posts mentioning any of these (python, remote, NYC...).
maxItems	integer	0 = no limit.

Example input:

{
  "mode": "search",
  "queries": [
    "apify",
    "web scraping"
  ],
  "sinceDays": 365,
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 30
}

Output

Each dataset item looks like this (real sample from a test run, long fields trimmed):

{
  "type": "story",
  "id": "50016426",
  "title": "Show HN:APIFlow Studio \u2013 Open-source, offline-first Postman alternative",
  "url": "https://apiflowstudio.onrender.com/",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50016426",
  "author": "yashpateldev",
  "points": 3,
  "numComments": 1,
  "createdAt": "2026-10-09T05:40:43Z",
  "text": null,
  "storyId": 50016426,
  "query": "apify",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-14T05:54:48+00:00"
}

Rows that could not be processed contain an error field and are not charged.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.001 per item (= $1.00 / 1,000). Use Max results to cap spend. Apify's free plan credit covers thousands of results per month.

Integrations & API

Run on a schedule in Apify Console, call via the Apify API / Python & JS clients, or connect to Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack and webhooks. Works as a tool for AI agents via Apify MCP.

FAQ

Is it legal? The actor only reads publicly available data from public endpoints, without logins, and does not bypass paywalls or access controls. You are responsible for using the data in line with applicable laws (e.g. GDPR) and the source sites' terms.

Something broke? Open an issue in the Issues tab; we typically respond within 24 hours and ship fixes fast.