Hacker News Who Is Hiring Scraper

What Does Hacker News Who Is Hiring Scraper Do?

This Apify actor scrapes the monthly "Who is Hiring" threads on Hacker News (Y Combinator). It extracts job postings from top-level comments, parsing company names, locations, roles, technology stacks, remote work availability, and full job descriptions. The result is a structured dataset of tech job opportunities from some of the most innovative startups and companies in the world.

Why Use This HN Job Scraper?

The Hacker News "Who is Hiring" monthly thread is one of the best sources for tech jobs, especially at startups, YC companies, and forward-thinking organizations. Manually scanning hundreds of comments is time-consuming and easy to miss relevant opportunities. This scraper automates the process, giving you a structured, searchable dataset of all job postings with automatic technology detection and remote work flagging.

How to Scrape HN Hiring Threads

1. Paste the URL of a Hacker News "Who is Hiring" thread (or use the default latest thread).
2. Set the maximum number of job postings to extract.
3. Run the actor and browse your structured job dataset.

The scraper identifies top-level comments (which are job postings) and parses the standard "Company | Location | Role" header format used by most posters. It also detects 50+ technology keywords to automatically tag each posting.

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
threadUrl	string	HN Who Is Hiring thread URL	Latest thread URL
maxResults	integer	Maximum job postings to extract	200

Output Data

Each job posting includes:

• company - Company name parsed from comment header
• location - Job location
• role - Job title or role
• description - Full job description text
• technologies - Automatically detected tech stack keywords
• remote - Whether remote work is mentioned
• url - Permalink to the HN comment
• author - HN username of the poster
• postedAt - When the comment was posted

Cost of Usage

Affordable and fast to run:

• Per result: $0.01
• Per 1,000 results: $10
• Actor start cost: $0.005

A typical monthly thread contains 300-600 job postings and can be scraped in under a minute.

Tips and Best Practices

• Find the latest "Who is Hiring" thread by searching Hacker News for "Ask HN: Who is hiring".
• The thread ID changes monthly. Check https://news.ycombinator.com for the current one.
• Use the technology tags in the output to filter for specific tech stacks.
• Schedule monthly runs to build a historical database of tech hiring trends.
• The "remote" field is auto-detected from the posting text.

Also try these related actors:

• Lobsters Tech News Scraper - Curated tech news
• GitHub Awesome List Scraper - Developer tool lists
• Wikipedia Article Extractor - Wikipedia content extraction