Hacker News API: stories, comments and "Who is hiring" as clean rows

For founders, marketers, researchers and recruiters who need Hacker News data in a spreadsheet instead of copying it by hand. Search stories by keyword, date and points, read the top/new/best lists, add comments, or turn the monthly "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread into one row per job posting. $1.00 per 1,000 items, you pay only for rows returned.

• Official public APIs only: the Algolia HN Search API (hn.algolia.com/api/v1) and the official Hacker News Firebase API (hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0). No HTML scraping, no login, no proxies.
• One flat row per story: id, title, url, domain, points, numComments, createdAt, type (story, ask, show, job, poll), hnUrl, plus by (the public HN username).
• Three modes: search (query, story type, date range, minimum points, newest or most relevant first), list (top, new, best, ask, show, job lists) and whoIsHiring.
• Optional comments: add a capped list of comments per story (text, createdAt, parentId, points, by). Comments are free.
• Who is hiring: top-level postings of the latest (or a chosen) monthly thread with company (text before the first |), remote and onsite flags and a location guess.
• Privacy: e-mail addresses and phone numbers are removed from all text and replaced with [removed].
• Free demo: leave the input empty and the Actor returns 3 sample stories without charging (_demo: true).

Input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "apify",
  "storyType": "show",
  "dateFrom": "2026-01-01",
  "minPoints": 10,
  "sortBy": "date",
  "includeComments": true,
  "maxCommentsPerStory": 20,
  "maxItems": 50
}

• mode: search, list or whoIsHiring.
• Search: query, storyType (story, ask, show, job), sortBy (date or relevance), dateFrom / dateTo (UTC, YYYY-MM-DD), minPoints.
• List: list (top, new, best, ask, show, job); query, minPoints, dateFrom / dateTo filter the fetched stories.
• Who is hiring: hiringMonth (latest, 2026-10 or October 2026), query (all words must appear), remoteOnly.
• maxItems: hard cap, 1 to 1000 (default 10). Algolia serves at most 1000 hits per query; split longer histories by date range.

Output (one item per story)

{
  "id": 41234567, "title": "Show HN: A tool for web scraping", "url": "https://example.com/tool", "domain": "example.com",
  "points": 154, "numComments": 61, "createdAt": "2026-10-01T15:04:05Z", "type": "show",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234567", "by": "someuser", "text": null,
  "comments": [{"id": 41234999, "by": "other", "text": "Nice work. How do you handle ...", "createdAt": "2026-10-01T16:00:00Z", "parentId": 41234567, "points": null}]
}

Who-is-hiring rows have type: "hiring_post", title = first line of the posting, text = the full posting, and:

{"company": "Acme", "remote": true, "onsite": false, "location": "Berlin", "threadId": 45000000, "threadTitle": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)"}

• url and domain are null for text posts (Ask HN). points of comments is null when the API does not give it.
• company, remote, onsite and location are simple guesses from the posting header; the full text is always included so you can check.
• A run summary (mode, items returned, thread read) is saved to the key-value store as SUMMARY.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.001 per story or posting returned ($1.00 per 1,000). Comments are included free with their story. Filters are applied before charging. The empty-input demo is free. Set a max charge per run in the run options to cap spend.

Use cases

• Brand and competitor monitoring: every new story that mentions your product or domain
• Trend and launch research: Show HN posts by date range and points
• Daily or weekly digests of the top stories with the first comments
• Hiring-market signals: companies, locations and remote share from the monthly Who is hiring thread

Notes

• Data comes only from the public Algolia and Firebase Hacker News APIs. Requests are polite: serial or in small batches with a short delay, timeouts and retries with backoff on 429 / 5xx.
• HN usernames appear only as by on stories, postings and comments (public pseudonyms). E-mail addresses and phone numbers are stripped on a best-effort basis; unusual obfuscations may slip through.
• A Who-is-hiring month with no thread returns no rows and is not charged.
• Not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News.

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