Hacker News Search and Who-is-Hiring Extractor – Hacker News scraper and API export

Give it a keyword, a date range or a points threshold, and get back Hacker News stories, comments or job posts as clean rows. It reads the free, public Hacker News Algolia search API, so there is no login and nothing to set up.

You get one row per story, comment or job post. Each row has the title, author, points, comment count, the Hacker News link, the external link and ISO timestamps. In hiring mode it reads the most recent monthly "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread and returns one row per job post.

Run it on a schedule from the Schedules tab to keep an eye on a topic over time.

Why this one

• Three modes in one tool. Pull stories, comments or Who-is-hiring job posts by changing a single setting.
• Filters that matter. Narrow by keywords, a UTC date range and a minimum points count for stories.
• Consistent fields. Every row has the same fields, and missing values are null, so your spreadsheet or code does not break.
• Stable links. Each row carries the item's hnUrl on news.ycombinator.com and the externalUrl of the linked page.
• No login. It only uses public Hacker News data.
• Cheap and fair. $3.10 per 1,000 results, and runs with no results cost nothing.

Quick start

{
  "mode": "story",
  "query": "llm",
  "minPoints": 0,
  "maxItems": 5
}

This returns up to 5 recent stories that match "llm", with title, author, points, comment count and links. In a test run on 28 Oct 2026 it returned 5 results.

What you can use it for

Who	What for
Recruiters and job seekers	Watch Who is hiring posts for a stack, remote roles or visa sponsorship
Product marketers and founders	Track mentions of your brand, competitors or category keywords
Analysts and investors	Measure tech-trend momentum through points and discussion volume
Developer relations teams	Collect community feedback threads for reports
Researchers	Build datasets of technology discussions with reliable timestamps

How to use it

1. Click Try for free.
2. Pick a Mode: story, comment or hiring.
3. Enter a Keyword query, for example llm. In hiring mode it filters job posts, for example remote rust. Leave it empty for everything.
4. Optionally set Created after (YYYY-MM-DD) and Created before (YYYY-MM-DD) to limit the date range. These are ignored in hiring mode.
5. For stories, set Minimum points to skip low-scoring posts, for example 100.
6. Set Maximum results (1 to 1,000).
7. Click Start.

To keep a topic up to date, schedule the run and compare new rows against the last export.

What data you get

Each row is one story, comment or job post. These fields come from the sample output for story mode.

Field	What it is	Example
id	Item ID	50271343
type	Kind of item	story
url	Link to the item on Hacker News	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271343
hnUrl	Hacker News link	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271343
externalUrl	Page the story links to	https://borisivanov.com/notes/local-llm-compile-bench/
title	Story title	Billion-query-per-second lookup tables in C++
author	Public HN username	signa11
points	Points the story has	5
numComments	Number of comments	0
storyId	ID of the parent story	50271088
createdAt	When it was posted (UTC)	2026-10-28T09:43:44.000Z
scrapedAt	When it was collected (UTC)	2026-10-28T10:29:05.851Z
text	Body text, or null	null

In hiring mode, rows also include threadId, company, headline, location, remote and visa.

Pricing

Event	Price
Result (each row written to the dataset)	$0.0031

There is no start fee. Runs with no results cost nothing.

Run	Cost
100 results	$0.31
1,000 results	$3.10
10,000 results	$31.00

Good to know

• Result cap. Each run returns at most 1,000 results.
• Deep history. Algolia limits deep paging to roughly 1,000 hits per query, so use narrow date ranges for big historical pulls.
• Data source. The official public Hacker News Algolia API (hn.algolia.com/api/v1). Only public posts are collected.
• Hiring fields are best guesses. company, location, remote and visa are read from the usual "Company | Role | Location" first line and can be null when a poster does it differently.
• Filters by mode. Date filters are ignored in hiring mode, and Minimum points applies to stories only.
• Not affiliated. This tool isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Hacker News, Y Combinator or Algolia.

Getting the data out

Download results as Excel, CSV or JSON from the Output tab. Send them to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make or webhooks from the Integrations tab. Every run is available through the Apify API. Schedule runs from Schedules.

Questions or problems

Open an issue on the Issues tab and include the run link. I reply within one business day.

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