Hacker News Scraper

Get Hacker News as clean rows: the front page and other feeds, keyword search across all of HN with date and points filters, or full comment threads, with an "only new since last run" mode for alerts.

What it does

• Feeds: front page, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN and jobs, with rank.
• Search: any keyword across all of HN’s stories or comments, with date range and minimum points.
• Comments: whole threads flattened to one row per comment, with depth and parent.
• Comment and post text converted from HTML to plain text.
• Only new: scheduled runs skip anything the same input already returned.

Why this one: One Actor for feeds, keyword search with date and points filters, and whole comment threads as rows, plus "only new since last run" for alerts. The free API alone gives you none of that ready-made.

In our last check, 20 runs over varied inputs succeeded 100% of the time.

Use cases

• Alerts when your product, company or topic is mentioned
• Tracking launches and trends in tech
• Collecting discussions for research or sentiment analysis

Input example

{
  "mode": "feed",
  "feed": "top",
  "maxItems": 10
}

• mode: feed, search or comments
• feed: top, new, best, ask, show, jobs
• query, searchIn, dateFrom, dateTo, minPoints
• storyIds: for comments mode
• onlyNew: skip items returned before

Output sample

Real results from a run of this Actor:

[
  {
    "id": 8004539,
    "type": "comment",
    "storyId": 8000528,
    "storyTitle": "Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs",
    "parentId": 8003859,
    "author": "Ecio78",
    "text": "The only problem is that I'm almost sure that DB were making millions not thanks to the excel data per se but thanks to all the logic that was running inside/behind that Excel.\nIn this case, you can't \"APIfy\" it with a tool like this.\n\nN.B. I'm not bashing sheetlabs, just saying that sometimes the most important part is not the numbers in the cell but how you create them",
    "createdAt": "2014-07-08T14:03:13.000Z",
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8004539",
    "sourceUrl": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-10-27T20:28:25.775Z"
  },
  {
    "id": 50261392,
    "type": "comment",
    "storyId": 50224617,
    "storyTitle": "Ask HN: What Are You Working on (Oct 2026)",
    "parentId": 50224617,
    "author": "cleanrowdata",
    "text": "A job postings index built from employers' own applicant tracking systems instead of job boards. It polls about 17,000 public Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday, SmartRecruiters and Workable boards (hourly, Workday daily), dedupes them into one schema (parsed salary, seniority, remote/region), and keeps closed jobs with a closed_at date, so you can see how long roles really stay open. The fiddly part has been Workday: 20 jobs per page, and the total count only appears on the first page.\n\nDisclosure, it's mine and it's paid per job returned: https://apify.com/cleanrowdata/fresh-jobs-index. Next up is per-company hiring rollups. Curious which filters people would actually use.",
    "createdAt": "2026-10-27T16:11:17.000Z",
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261392",
    "sourceUrl": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-10-27T20:28:25.775Z"
  }
]

Fields:

• Stories: id, title, url, domain, author, points, comments, createdAt, text, hnUrl, rank
• Comments: id, storyId, storyTitle, parentId, depth, author, text, createdAt, hnUrl

Pricing

Pay per result: $2.00 per 1,000 results. You pay only for results you get; Apify platform costs are included. Set a maximum charge for a run and the Actor stops cleanly when it's reached, keeping everything collected so far.

Tips

• Schedule search mode hourly with "Only new" on to get a mention alert feed.
• Paste HN links straight into Stories; the ID is picked out for you.

FAQ

Do I need an account on Hacker News? No. It only reads public pages and data.

Is this the official API? It uses Hacker News’s official API and the public HN Search by Algolia, and adds search, filters, threads and alerts on top. Something broke or a field is missing? Open an issue on the Issues tab and include your run link. We fix scrapers quickly when sites change.

Legal

This Actor collects publicly available data only. You're responsible for using it lawfully and in line with Hacker News's terms.