Hacker News Search Scraper

Search all of Hacker News: stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN, polls and jobs, by keyword, author, thread, points, comment count and date range. Or pull the current front page (top, new, best, Ask, Show, jobs) in ranked order. Every row has the title, link, author, points, comment count, date, the full text (clean plain text plus the original HTML) and the news.ycombinator.com link. No login or proxy needed, and runs finish in seconds. $0.19 per 1,000 items (less on paid plans).

What you can do with it

• Brand and product monitoring: find every story and comment that mentions your company, product or competitors, newest first, on a daily schedule.
• Developer sentiment research: collect comments on a technology (Rust, Postgres, LLM agents) over a date range for analysis or an LLM pipeline.
• Launch tracking: list every Show HN or Ask HN above a points threshold in a given month.
• Thread export: download every comment in one discussion (story ID + Comments), or turn on Add each story's comments to get the discussion under every search result or front-page story.
• Who is talking: add each author's karma, account age and profile text for influence and lead research.
• Front page snapshots: save the top 30 (or 500) stories with rank, points and comment count, every hour.
• Author history: everything a given HN user has posted.

Looking for job posts from the monthly "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" threads? Our separate HN Who is Hiring actor parses those into one row per job. This actor is general search.

How to use

1. Type one or more search queries (or leave the default to try it).
2. Pick an item type (stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN...), a sort (relevance or newest first) and any filters: minimum points, minimum comments, date range, author, story ID.
3. Set Max items, run, and download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read them via the API.

For the front page, set Mode to list and pick a List type.

Input

Field	What it does
mode	search (default) or list (current ranked list).
queries	Search terms, one per line. Default web scraping. An empty query with an author/story/date filter lists everything matching the filter.
type	story (default), comment, ask_hn, show_hn, poll, job or all.
sort	relevance (default) or date (newest first).
minPoints, minComments	Numeric thresholds. Comments have no points on HN, so keep minPoints at 0 for comments.
dateFrom, dateTo	YYYY-MM-DD (UTC), inclusive.
author	HN username.
storyId	One thread: an id or a news.ycombinator.com item URL.
listType	List mode: top, new, best, ask, show, job.
maxItems	Hard cap on results for the run (also caps cost). Default 50, maximum 50,000.
includeComments, maxCommentsPerStory, commentDepth	Also return each story's discussion as comment rows right after it, top comments in the page's ranking order (with depth, threadOf); each comment is one item.
includeAuthorProfile	Add the author's karma, account creation date and profile text to every row.
maxItemsPerQuery	Optional cap for each query.

Example: every Show HN with 100+ points in September 2026, newest first:

{ "queries": [""], "type": "show_hn", "minPoints": 100, "dateFrom": "2026-09-01", "dateTo": "2026-09-30", "sort": "date", "maxItems": 500 }

Output

One row per story or comment:

{
  "objectID": "22180559",
  "type": "story",
  "isAskHN": false,
  "isShowHN": false,
  "title": "Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)",
  "url": "https://parsers.me/...",
  "author": "...",
  "points": 1057,
  "numComments": 336,
  "createdAt": "2020-01-30T13:49:57Z",
  "createdAtTimestamp": 1580392197,
  "text": null,
  "textHtml": null,
  "storyId": "22180559",
  "parentId": null,
  "storyTitle": "Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)",
  "storyUrl": "https://parsers.me/...",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559",
  "storyHnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559",
  "tags": ["story", "author_...", "story_22180559"],
  "query": "web scraping",
  "source": "Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com)"
}

Comments add text (plain text, links kept), textHtml (original HTML), parentId, and the parent story's storyTitle/storyUrl. List mode adds rank and list.

Field	Meaning
objectID	HN item id
type	story, comment, poll, pollopt or job
isAskHN, isShowHN	Ask HN / Show HN flags
title, url	Story title and the link it points to
author	HN username
points, numComments	Score and comment count (stories)
createdAt, createdAtTimestamp	Post time, ISO UTC and Unix seconds
text, textHtml	Body text: plain, and the original HTML
storyId, parentId	Thread and parent ids (comments)
storyTitle, storyUrl, storyHnUrl	The thread a comment belongs to
hnUrl	Link to the item on news.ycombinator.com
tags	Search tags (type, author, story)
query	The search that found it
rank, list	List mode only

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.19 per 1,000 items on the Free plan, down to $0.09 on higher plans (item-scraped event). Filters and caps apply before you are charged, and duplicate items across your queries are only charged once. A run that finds nothing fails instead of silently returning an empty dataset.

Apify plan tier	Free	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum	Diamond
per 1,000 items	$0.19	$0.17	$0.14	$0.09	$0.09	$0.09

Limits and notes

• 1,000 results per relevance search. Hacker News search returns at most 1,000 hits for one query. With sort = date this actor gets past that, so you can pull tens of thousands of items for one query. Relevance searches stop at 1,000; split the date range or use several queries for more.
• Points and comment counts in search results can trail the live site by a few minutes.
• Comments have no points on Hacker News, so a points filter returns no comments.
• Deleted and flagged-dead items are not returned.
• Requests are spaced politely; a 50-item run takes a few seconds, large date-sorted runs a few hundred items per second.

Data comes from Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com). Every row links back to the item on news.ycombinator.com. This actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Y Combinator or Hacker News.