Hacker News "Who Is Hiring" Scraper

Turn Hacker News "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" monthly threads into a clean spreadsheet of job postings — company, role, location, salary, remote status, tech stack, apply links, and contact emails, one row per posting. Every month's thread holds hundreds of comments in free-form text; this actor reads them for you and parses each into structured fields. Built for recruiters, job seekers, and market researchers who need structured Hacker News hiring data without scrolling through hundreds of comments by hand.

Why This Scraper?

• Structured extraction of 9 fields from free-text postings — company, role, location, salary, remote status, tech stack, visa sponsorship, apply URL, and contact email are parsed out of each comment automatically, no manual reading.
• 60-technology stack detection — every posting is scanned against a maintained dictionary of 60+ languages, frameworks, databases, and clouds (Python, Rust, React, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, AWS, and more) and returned as a clean tag array.
• Remote / Hybrid / Onsite classification — each posting is labeled, and a single "Remote jobs only" toggle keeps just the remote, hybrid, distributed, and work-from-home roles.
• Full-text keyword search across all of Hacker News — search every comment ever posted (not only the hiring threads) for a stack, company, or phrase like "Rust remote".
• Up to 24 months of hiring history in one run — pull the last two years of "Who is hiring?" threads in a single pass for hiring-volume analysis and salary trends where postings disclose pay.
• Target any thread by link or ID — paste a full news.ycombinator.com/item?id= link or just the number; works for "Who wants to be hired?" and freelancer threads too.
• Include / exclude keyword filters — keep only postings mentioning your terms ("senior", "San Francisco") and drop the ones you don't want ("onsite only", "unpaid"), case-insensitive.
• The original fullText is always saved — even when a posting breaks convention and a structured field can't be parsed, the complete posting text is never lost.
• Deduplicated rows — a posting that appears in both a thread and your keyword search is saved once, never twice.

Use Cases

Recruiting & Sourcing

• Build a live feed of companies actively hiring this month
• Source candidate-facing competitors by role and location
• Spot which companies post every month versus one-off hirers
• Compile apply links and contact emails into a single outreach list

Job Seeking

• Filter hundreds of postings down to your stack in seconds
• Surface only remote or hybrid roles across every company
• Track a target company's hiring across consecutive months
• Find roles that mention visa sponsorship or relocation

Market & Salary Research

• Pull two years of threads to chart salary ranges where posters disclose them
• Measure how often a technology appears month over month
• Compare remote-vs-onsite share across the developer market
• Map hiring activity by city and region

Competitive & Trend Intelligence

• Watch which startups and scale-ups are expanding headcount
• Track adoption curves for languages and frameworks by mention count
• Benchmark posted compensation against the field, for the postings that state it
• Feed structured hiring signals into dashboards and reports

Getting Started

Scrape the Latest Month

Leave everything blank to pull the most recent "Who is hiring?" thread:

{
    "monthsBack": 1
}

Scrape a Specific Thread

Paste any thread link or bare ID:

{
    "threadUrls": ["https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563283"]
}

Keyword Search, Remote Only, Filtered

Search the last six months, keep only remote roles that mention Rust, and drop anything that says onsite:

{
    "monthsBack": 6,
    "searchQuery": "Rust remote",
    "remoteOnly": true,
    "includeKeywords": ["Rust"],
    "excludeKeywords": ["onsite only"],
    "maxResults": 500
}

Input Reference

What to Scrape

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
monthsBack	integer	1	How many of the most recent monthly "Who is hiring?" threads to include, counting back from the latest. Leave blank to scrape only specific links or a search below; leave everything blank for the latest month. Max 24.
threadUrls	string[]	—	Specific Hacker News threads to scrape. Paste full item?id= links or just the number. Works for any thread, including "Who wants to be hired?" and freelancer threads.
searchQuery	string	—	Optionally search across all of Hacker News for a word or phrase (e.g. "machine learning"), not just the hiring threads. Leave empty to skip.

Filters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
includeKeywords	string[]	[]	Keep only postings that mention at least one of these words or phrases. Case-insensitive. Leave empty to keep everything.
excludeKeywords	string[]	[]	Drop postings that mention any of these words or phrases. Case-insensitive. Leave empty to exclude nothing.
remoteOnly	boolean	false	Keep only postings that mention remote, hybrid, or distributed work.

Limits

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxResults	integer	1000	The most job postings to save across all selected threads and searches. Set to 0 for no limit. A limit keeps runs fast and predictable.

Output

Each job posting becomes one flat row. Structured fields are filled in on a best-effort basis from the free-form posting text, so some may be empty when a poster doesn't follow the usual format — but fullText always carries the complete posting.

{
    "commentId": "40565123",
    "threadId": "40563283",
    "threadTitle": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)",
    "threadMonth": "June 2026",
    "author": "janedoe",
    "company": "Adacore",
    "role": "Senior Backend Engineer",
    "location": "San Francisco",
    "remote": "Remote",
    "salary": "$150k-$200k",
    "techStack": ["Python", "PostgreSQL", "AWS", "Kubernetes"],
    "visa": "Visa sponsorship available",
    "applyUrl": "https://adacore.com/careers",
    "email": "jobs@adacore.com",
    "fullText": "Adacore | Senior Backend Engineer | San Francisco | Remote | $150k-$200k\nWe're hiring engineers to build...",
    "postedAt": "2026-06-02T14:11:03Z",
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40565123",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-17T09:30:00Z"
}

Posting & Thread

Field	Type	Description
commentId	string	Hacker News ID of this job posting
threadId	string	ID of the hiring thread the posting belongs to
threadTitle	string	Full thread title, e.g. "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)"
threadMonth	string	Month and year parsed from the title, e.g. "June 2026"
author	string	Hacker News username that posted the job
fullText	string	Complete plain-text job posting — always present
hnUrl	string	Direct link to the posting on Hacker News
postedAt	string	When the posting was published (ISO 8601)
scrapedAt	string	When this run collected the row (ISO 8601)

Parsed Job Details

Best-effort fields parsed from the posting text. Empty when the poster's format doesn't expose them.

Field	Type	Description
company	string	Company name from the posting
role	string	Job title / role from the posting
location	string	Location(s) detected in the posting
remote	string	Work arrangement: "Remote", "Hybrid", or "Onsite"
salary	string	Compensation text, captured verbatim
techStack	string[]	Technologies detected from the 60-entry dictionary
visa	string	Visa sponsorship or relocation note if mentioned
applyUrl	string	First application or company link in the posting
email	string	Contact email if one appears

Tips for Best Results

• Leave it blank for a quick test — running with no input pulls the latest month so you can see the data shape before scaling up.
• Combine search with include filters — pair searchQuery with includeKeywords to laser-target a stack: search "remote" broadly, then keep only postings that also mention "Go" or "Elixir".
• Raise monthsBack for trend analysis — set it to 12 or 24 to track technology mentions and (where posters state them) salary ranges over a long window in one run; this is the fastest path to historical hiring data.
• Salary, visa, and email are captured only when the poster states them — Hacker News postings are free-form, so these fields are filled in where the text spells them out and left empty otherwise; fullText always holds the complete posting for anything the parser doesn't pick up.
• Use the "Remote jobs only" toggle, not a keyword — it catches remote, hybrid, distributed, and work-from-home phrasing that a single keyword would miss.
• Lean on fullText for the unusual postings — when a structured field is empty, the original text is still there, so you never lose a posting that simply broke the usual format.
• Set a maxResults cap on broad runs — a single busy thread can hold 300+ postings; a cap keeps a multi-month run fast and the result count predictable.
• Paste links for non-hiring threads — threadUrls also works on "Who wants to be hired?" and freelancer threads, so the same parsing gives you candidate-side data too.

Pricing

From $1.80 per 1,000 results — pay only for the job postings you collect. No compute or time-based charges — you pay per result, plus a small fixed per-run start fee. Bronze, Silver, and Gold subscribers pay progressively less; the table below shows total cost at each discount tier.

Results	No discount	Bronze	Silver	Gold
100	$0.22	$0.21	$0.20	$0.18
1,000	$2.15	$2.05	$1.95	$1.80
10,000	$21.50	$20.50	$19.50	$18.00
100,000	$215.00	$205.00	$195.00	$180.00

A "result" is one job posting saved to your dataset. Platform fees (compute, storage) are additional and depend on your Apify plan.

Integrations

Export data in JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or RSS. Connect to 1,500+ apps via:

• Zapier / Make / n8n — Workflow automation
• Google Sheets — Direct spreadsheet export
• Slack / Email — Notifications on new results
• Webhooks — Trigger custom APIs on run completion
• Apify API — Full programmatic access

Legal & Ethical Use

This actor is designed for legitimate recruiting research, job searching, and labor-market analysis using publicly visible Hacker News posts. You are responsible for complying with applicable laws and Hacker News' terms of use. Do not use collected contact details for spam, harassment, or any unlawful purpose, and handle any personal data such as emails responsibly.