📰 Hacker News Scraper

Fetch Hacker News top, new, best, ask, show, job stories via official Firebase API. Filter by score, analyze top domains. Stable 10+ year API.

Store Quickstart

Start with the Quickstart template (top stories, 20 items). For tech trend monitoring, use Top Trends with minScore=100 and domain analysis.

Key Features

• 🔥 Official Firebase API — hacker-news.firebaseio.com — 10+ year stable
• 📂 6 story modes — top, new, best, ask, show, job
• ⭐ Score filtering — Minimum score threshold for quality filtering
• 💬 Comment threads — Optional nested comment extraction
• 🏷️ Top domains analysis — Which domains dominate the front page
• 🔑 No API key needed — Public Firebase API

Use Cases

Who	Why
Tech journalists	Daily Hacker News trend reports
Startup founders	Watch which tools/frameworks gain HN traction
VCs/Investors	Signal for emerging tech and founder announcements
Developer tool companies	Monitor HN sentiment on products and competitors
AI/ML researchers	Discover papers and repos trending in tech community

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	top	top, new, best, ask, show, job
maxItems	integer	30	Max stories (1-500)
minScore	integer	0	Minimum score filter
includeComments	boolean	false	Include comment threads

Input Example

{
  "mode": "top",
  "maxItems": 30,
  "minScore": 100,
  "includeComments": false
}

Output Example

{
  "id": 12345678,
  "title": "Claude 4.5 released with new features",
  "url": "https://anthropic.com/news/claude-4-5",
  "score": 523,
  "by": "user123",
  "time": 1712345678,
  "descendants": 142,
  "type": "story"
}

FAQ

What does score mean?

Net upvotes (upvotes minus downvotes). 100+ is front-page quality. 500+ is viral.

How often does the HN front page update?

Rapidly — rankings shift every few minutes. Scrape hourly for trend tracking.

Can I get old/archived stories?

Yes, the 'new' mode iterates chronologically; 'best' returns high-score stories over time.

What's the comment limit?

All comments under a story are available via the API. Comment-heavy posts slow down extraction.

Related Actors

News & Content cluster — explore related Apify tools:

• 📰 Google News Scraper — Scrape Google News articles for any search query via official RSS feed.
• 📰 Article Extractor — Extract clean article content with title, author, publish date, images from news and blog pages.
• 📄 Website Content Extractor — Extract clean main content from any webpage as text, markdown, or HTML.
• 📡 RSS Feed Aggregator — Aggregate multiple RSS and Atom feeds with keyword filtering and deduplication.

Cost

Pay Per Event:

• actor-start: $0.01 (flat fee per run)
• dataset-item: $0.003 per output item

Example: 1,000 items = $0.01 + (1,000 × $0.003) = $3.01

No subscription required — you only pay for what you use.