Hacker News Scraper: Search, Threads & Who Is Hiring Jobs

Three ways to get Hacker News data as clean JSON, all through the official HN search API (by Algolia):

1. Search stories and/or comments by keyword, newest first or most relevant, with date range and minimum points. Goes past the API's usual 1,000-result cap for date-sorted searches.
2. Who is hiring? jobs: turns the monthly "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread into a job table with company, role, location, remote, salary, visa, apply links and the full post. Filter by keywords or remote only.
3. Full threads: every comment of any story, flattened with depth and parent, ready for analysis or summarizing.

Add Only new items and a schedule to get alerts: new mentions of your brand, new posts about a topic, new job posts.

Who it's for

• Founders and marketers: track mentions of your product or competitors.
• Recruiters and job seekers: the HN hiring thread as a filterable spreadsheet.
• Researchers and AI builders: stories and discussions for trend analysis, sentiment or RAG.

Input

Option	Mode	What it does
What to get	all	Search, Who is hiring? jobs, or full threads
Search query, Search in, Sort by	search	Words to find; stories, comments or both; newest or most relevant
From / To date, Minimum points	search	Narrow the results
Hiring thread month	jobs	e.g. "September 2026"; empty = latest
Job keywords, Remote jobs only	jobs	Filter job posts
Thread URLs or IDs	thread	HN item links
Max items	all	Stop after this many rows
Only new items	all	Skip items seen in earlier runs with the same settings

Output

A job from the hiring thread (real example, shortened):

{
  "type": "job",
  "id": 49922606,
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922606",
  "postedAt": "2026-10-01T15:03:25.000Z",
  "thread": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)",
  "company": "We The Flywheel",
  "role": "Production Designer",
  "location": "REMOTE (async, global)",
  "remote": true,
  "salary": null,
  "visa": null,
  "headline": "We The Flywheel | Production Designer | REMOTE (async, global) | …",
  "applyLinks": ["…"],
  "applyEmails": [],
  "text": "…"
}

A story from search:

{
  "type": "story",
  "id": 49917863,
  "title": "Show HN: …",
  "url": "https://…",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49917863",
  "author": "…",
  "points": 2,
  "comments": 0,
  "createdAt": "2026-10-01T04:50:24Z",
  "tags": []
}

Pricing

You pay per item returned (story, comment or job). See the Pricing tab.

Limits, honestly

• Job fields are parsed from free text, following the thread's "Company | Role | Location | …" convention. Most posts parse well; unusual ones may leave a field empty. The full post is always included in text.
• applyEmails only lists shared inboxes like jobs@ or careers@. We don't support the "Who wants to be hired?" thread, because it's a list of individual people.
• Data comes from the HN search API, which can lag the live site by a few minutes.

More tools from SwiftKit

• Job Scraper: every open job from company job boards (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby…)
• RSS Feed Reader: news, blogs and podcasts from any feed or website, only new items
• Tech Stack Detector: what a website is built with: CMS, analytics, ecommerce, hosting
• Job Search API: search jobs across 10,000+ company career sites at once

Questions?

Open an issue on the Issues tab.