Hacker News Scraper - Who Is Hiring Jobs & Stories API

What does Hacker News Scraper do?

Hacker News Scraper turns the monthly "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread into a clean jobs dataset and searches Hacker News stories by keyword. Each job post becomes one structured row with the company, roles, locations, remote/onsite/hybrid flags, parsed salary range and currency, visa sponsorship, apply link and the applicant tracking system (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable and more) behind it. Stories come with points, comment counts, links and dates.

Use it as a Hacker News jobs API, a Who is hiring scraper for startup job boards and recruiting pipelines, or a Hacker News search API for brand and topic monitoring. It reads the official HN Search API (by Algolia), needs no login and no API key, and the default run returns 20 parsed job posts from the latest thread in about 5 seconds.

Why use Hacker News Scraper?

• Structured jobs, not raw comments. Most HN scrapers give you a blob of HTML per comment. This actor parses the conventional Company | Role | Location | REMOTE | Salary header into separate fields, so you can filter and sort straight away.
• Salary, remote and visa filters built in. Ask for "remote Rust jobs with a stated salary that sponsor visas" and get exactly that.
• Find the hiring company's job board. When a post links to Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, Recruitee, Teamtailor, SmartRecruiters, Work at a Startup or Wellfound, you get the provider and board slug. Feed it to our Career Site Jobs API to pull every open role at that company, not just the ones mentioned on HN.
• Monitor mode. Turn on onlyNew and schedule the actor daily: each run returns only posts or stories you haven't seen yet. Already-seen items are free.
• Full history. The "Who is hiring?" threads go back to 2011. Pick any months for a hiring-trend dataset.
• Official source, stable schema. Data comes from the public HN Search API by Algolia. No browser, no proxy, no login, so runs are fast, cheap and reliable.
• Privacy-aware. No HN usernames are returned. Personal e-mail addresses and phone numbers inside posts are replaced with [email] / [phone]; role mailboxes such as jobs@ or careers@ are kept as contactEmail.

What data can you extract?

Who is hiring? job posts (one row per post)

Field	Example	Description
company	River	Company name from the post header
companyNote	Series B	Text in brackets after the name (funding stage, YC batch, location note)
ycBatch	S24	Y Combinator batch when the post mentions one
roles	["Staff Engineers (Elixir)"]	Role segments from the header
locations	["NYC US, Europe, South America"]	Location segments (city, country, region or time zone)
techStack	["TypeScript / Postgres / React"]	Tech-stack segments when the header lists them
remote / onsite / hybrid	true / false / false	Work arrangement flags from the header
employmentType	["full-time"]	full-time, part-time, contract, internship
visaSponsorship	true	true if the post offers sponsorship, false if it rules it out, null if it doesn't say
salaryText	$200K-$250K + equity	The salary as written
salaryMin / salaryMax / salaryCurrency	200000 / 250000 / USD	Parsed annual range and currency
applyUrl	https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/river	Best apply link (ATS board first, then careers/jobs pages)
companyUrl	https://www.prairielearn.com	Company website
atsProvider / atsSlug	ashby / river	Applicant tracking system and board slug
careerSiteJobsApiCompany	ashby:river	Ready-made input for Career Site Jobs API
contactEmail	jobs@example.com	Role mailbox from the post (personal addresses are never returned)
urls	[...]	All links in the post
headline	River | Staff Engineers (Elixir) | ...	The header line as posted
text	...	Full post as plain text (optional, redacted)
postedAt	2026-10-01T15:30:44Z	When the post was written
hnUrl / hnItemId	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923010	Link to the post on HN
threadTitle / threadMonth	Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026) / 2026-10	Source thread
replies	1	Number of direct replies
matchedKeywords	["rust"]	Which of your keywords matched

Stories (one row per story)

Field	Example	Description
title	My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping	Story title
url / domain	https://... / example.com	Linked article and its domain
points / comments	113 / 48	Score and number of comments
storyType	story, ask_hn, show_hn	Kind of item
postedAt	2026-10-12T18:02:32Z	Submission time
storyText	...	Body of Ask HN / Show HN posts (redacted)
onFrontPage	true	Whether the item is on the front page now
query	web scraping	The search query that found it
hnUrl / hnItemId	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...	Discussion link

How to use Hacker News Scraper (step by step)

1. Click Try for free (or Start) on this page. The default input returns 20 job posts from the latest "Who is hiring?" thread.
2. Choose What to scrape: Who is hiring? job posts, Stories, or Both.
3. For jobs, add Job keywords such as python or machine learning, and tick Remote jobs only, Visa sponsorship only or With salary only as needed. Add Months (e.g. 2026-09) for past threads.
4. For stories, add Story search queries (your brand, a competitor, a technology) and optionally a Minimum points or Published within (days) filter. Choose Current front page to get today's front page without a query.
5. Set Max results and click Start. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or open the Who is hiring? jobs / Stories table views.
6. For monitoring, turn on Only new items since the last run, give the monitor a Watch name, and add a daily schedule in Apify Console.

Input example

{
  "mode": "whoIsHiring",
  "keywords": ["python", "rust"],
  "remoteOnly": true,
  "withSalaryOnly": true,
  "months": ["2026-10", "2026-09"],
  "maxResults": 200
}

Stories example (brand monitoring, newest first, only new mentions each day):

{
  "mode": "stories",
  "searchQueries": ["apify", "web scraping"],
  "minPoints": 10,
  "sortBy": "date",
  "onlyNew": true,
  "watchName": "brand-mentions",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Output example

[
  {
    "type": "job-post",
    "company": "River",
    "roles": ["Staff Engineers (Elixir)"],
    "locations": ["NYC US, Europe, South America"],
    "remote": true,
    "onsite": false,
    "hybrid": false,
    "employmentType": ["full-time"],
    "visaSponsorship": null,
    "salaryText": "$200K-$250K + equity",
    "salaryCurrency": "USD",
    "salaryMin": 200000,
    "salaryMax": 250000,
    "applyUrl": "https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/river?utm_source=Zp9nJyqvd4",
    "atsProvider": "ashby",
    "atsSlug": "river",
    "careerSiteJobsApiCompany": "ashby:river",
    "headline": "River | Staff Engineers (Elixir) | NYC or REMOTE (US, Europe, South America) | Full-Time | $200K-$250K + equity | https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/river?utm_source=Zp9nJyqvd4",
    "postedAt": "2026-10-01T15:30:44.000Z",
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923010",
    "threadTitle": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)",
    "threadMonth": "2026-10"
  },
  {
    "type": "story",
    "storyType": "story",
    "query": "web scraping",
    "title": "My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping",
    "points": 113,
    "postedAt": "2026-10-12T18:02:32Z",
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...",
    "onFrontPage": false
  }
]

Every run also writes free _info rows when nothing matched (for example "No new job posts since the last run"), so a scheduled run never ends with an empty dataset. You can export the dataset to CSV, Excel, JSON, XML or HTML, or read it through the Apify API.

How much does it cost?

Hacker News Scraper uses pay-per-event pricing: you pay only for rows you get.

Event	Price (Free plan)	When it is charged
Actor start	$0.0005	Once per run
Job post returned	$0.002 ($2 per 1,000)	One parsed "Who is hiring?" post
Story returned	$0.001 ($1 per 1,000)	One story or front-page item

Info rows, errors and already-seen items in monitor mode are free. Paid Apify plans get Store discounts on the per-row prices (Bronze −15%, Silver −30%, Gold and up −45%).

Worked examples (Free plan prices):

• A whole monthly thread (about 270 job posts in October 2026): 270 × $0.002 + $0.0005 ≈ $0.54.
• A daily monitor of new posts with onlyNew (about 10 new posts a day after the first days of the month): ≈ $0.02 per day, about $0.60 per month.
• Twelve months of history for a hiring-trend analysis (about 3,500 posts): ≈ $7.
• A daily brand-mention check across 3 queries returning 5 new stories a day: ≈ $0.005 per day, about $0.15 per month.

The Apify Free plan includes monthly platform credit, which covers many runs like these.

Use cases

• Job seekers: get every remote Rust, Go or ML role with a stated salary from this month's thread in one spreadsheet, and track new posts daily.
• Recruiters and talent sourcers: see which startups are hiring for which roles, where and at what pay, and link straight to their ATS board.
• Sales and lead generation: companies that post on "Who is hiring?" are funded and growing. Use the company, website and ATS slug as warm leads for developer tools, recruiting services or B2B SaaS.
• Market and salary research: compare salary ranges, remote share and visa sponsorship across months and years, from 2011 onwards.
• Developer relations and marketing: monitor HN for mentions of your product, competitors or technology, with points and comments to spot what is taking off.
• AI agents and newsletters: feed today's front page or a topic search into a summarizer or a weekly digest.

Use with AI agents, MCP and the API

Start a run and get the results with one call (replace YOUR_TOKEN):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/teddythebuilder~hacker-news-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"mode": "whoIsHiring", "keywords": ["python"], "remoteOnly": true, "maxResults": 50}'

Python with the apify-client package:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("teddythebuilder/hacker-news-scraper").call(
    run_input={"mode": "whoIsHiring", "keywords": ["rust"], "withSalaryOnly": True, "maxResults": 100}
)
for job in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(job.get("company"), job.get("salaryMin"), job.get("applyUrl"))

AI agents can find and call this actor through the Apify MCP server (search-actors, then call-actor). The small default input, flat JSON output and $0.0005 start fee keep agent probe calls cheap.

Integrations

Connect the dataset to Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, Make, Zapier, n8n or any webhook through Apify integrations. A typical setup is a daily schedule with onlyNew turned on and a Slack or e-mail notification for each new matching job post.

Data source and legality

All data comes from the public HN Search API by Algolia, the official search backend that Hacker News links to, which is free to use without a key. The actor requests one thread or search page at a time and respects the API's rate limits.

The actor returns job and story metadata that companies and submitters published publicly on Hacker News. It does not return HN usernames, and it redacts personal e-mail addresses and phone numbers in post texts. "Who wants to be hired?" threads, where individuals post about themselves, are deliberately not supported. You are responsible for using the data in line with applicable laws (such as GDPR) and the terms of the sites you contact.

FAQ

How many job posts does a "Who is hiring?" thread have? Usually 250 to 700 top-level posts. October 2026 had about 270. Replies to posts are not returned as separate rows; the replies field shows how many there are.

How accurate is the parsing? Most posts follow the Company | Role | Location | REMOTE | Salary convention, and those parse well: in October 2026, 265 of 266 posts had a company, 141 were flagged remote, 67 had a parsed salary range and 47 linked an ATS board. Free-form posts still get a company, links and the full text. The original headline and text are always included so you can check any row.

Can I get older threads? Yes. Add months such as 2024-01 or January 2024 to Months. The threads go back to April 2011.

How does monitor mode work? With Only new items since the last run on, the actor remembers the IDs it returned per Watch name in a key-value store in your account. The next run skips them and doesn't charge for them. Use different watch names for different searches.

Why didn't my story search return anything? Search matches words in titles, URLs and story text without typo tolerance. Try a shorter query, remove the Minimum points filter, or switch Sort stories by to Relevance. A free _info row tells you when nothing matched.

Does it work on the Apify Free plan? Yes. A full monthly thread costs about $0.54, well within the Free plan's monthly credit.

Can you add a field or another source? Yes, please open an issue on the actor's Issues tab. If the actor saves you time, a rating on the Store page helps other users find it.

Related actors

• Career Site Jobs API - Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby & Workable: all open roles from a company's job board. Use the careerSiteJobsApiCompany value from this actor as its input.
• Tech Stack Detector: which technologies the hiring companies' websites use.
• Domain WHOIS & DNS Lookup API: registration, DNS, mail and SSL data for company domains.
• Swedish Jobs Scraper - Platsbanken: all Swedish job ads from the official Arbetsförmedlingen API.

Changelog and support

• 1.0 (October 2026): first release. Who is hiring? parsing (company, roles, location, remote, salary, visa, ATS), story search and front page, monitor mode.

Found a bug or a post that parses badly? Open an issue with the HN link. We reply within 24 hours.