HN AI Product Scout

Daily AI product discovery from Hacker News Show HN.

Stop manually scrolling Hacker News every morning. This Actor pulls the latest Show HN posts via the official HN API, detects which ones are AI/ML/devtools products, and outputs structured JSON + CSV — ready to pipe into Notion, Airtable, Slack, or your own database.

Who This Is For

• VCs & angel investors — spot promising AI startups before they hit TechCrunch
• Founders & indie hackers — track competitors and find gaps in the market
• Product managers — weekly competitive landscape reports from the HN launch feed
• Analysts & journalists — data for AI industry trend pieces and market maps

Why Hacker News Show HN

Show HN is where founders launch products to get feedback from one of the toughest technical audiences on the internet. Compared to Product Hunt:

• Earlier-stage launches — many products appear on HN weeks or months before hitting PH
• Higher signal in comments — HN discussions often include detailed technical deep-dives, not just "congrats on the launch"
• No Cloudflare, no auth, no anti-bot — HN has a clean, open API and HTML. This Actor runs fast and reliably
• Founder-filtered — Show HN requires the submitter to have built the thing themselves

What You Get

Field	Description
name	Product name (parsed from Show HN title)
tagline	One-line pitch extracted from the title
description	Post body text (first 1000 chars, HTML stripped)
url	Product website URL
website	External product URL from the post
votesCount	Number of upvotes
commentsCount	Discussion comment count
topics	Auto-detected tags (AI/ML, DevTools, SaaS, Fintech, etc.)
isAI	Auto-detected: is this an AI/ML or devtools product?
launchDate	Post timestamp (ISO format)
hnUrl	Direct link to the HN discussion thread
by	HN username of the submitter

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	50	Maximum number of products to extract (1–500)
includeAIOnly	boolean	true	Only include AI/ML/devtools products. Set to false to get all Show HN launches
minVotes	integer	3	Skip posts with fewer than this many upvotes (1–1000)

How to Use

1. Set maxItems — how many products do you want? Default is 50
2. Choose AI-only or all — toggle includeAIOnly to narrow or broaden results
3. Set a vote threshold — minVotes: 5 filters out low-signal launches
4. Run — results in JSON dataset + CSV

Pricing

This Actor is pay-per-result. Suggested pricing:

Price per 1,000 results	For
$0.10 – $0.50	Standard — structured HN data, no external API costs

Since this Actor uses only the free HN Firebase API (no paid third-party APIs), costs are minimal. You pay for the extraction and classification logic.

Output Format

• JSON — each product is a separate item in the Apify Dataset, queryable and filterable in the Console
• CSV — available as hn-ai-scout-results.csv in the Key-Value Store
• OUTPUT — JSON summary with totalProducts, aiProducts, avgVotes, and top5

Example Output

{
  "name": "ClaudeDock",
  "tagline": "Manage Claude Projects from your menubar",
  "description": "A macOS app that sits in your menubar and lets you switch...",
  "url": "https://claudedock.com",
  "website": "https://claudedock.com",
  "votesCount": 847,
  "commentsCount": 143,
  "topics": ["AI / ML", "Developer Tools", "Productivity"],
  "isAI": true,
  "launchDate": "2026-06-23T14:30:00.000Z",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234567",
  "by": "janechen"
}

FAQ

Q: Is scraping Hacker News allowed? A: Yes. This Actor uses the official HN Firebase API (hacker-news.firebaseio.com), which is publicly available and rate-limit friendly. No HTML scraping is needed for the core data pipeline.

Q: How fresh is the data? A: Real-time. Each run fetches live data from the HN API. Show HN stories cycle frequently — the /showstories endpoint returns the current crop of Show HN posts.

Q: Can I schedule daily runs? A: Yes. Use Apify's built-in scheduler to run this Actor daily, and pipe results to your email, Slack, or Airtable via Apify integrations.

Q: What counts as an "AI product"? A: The Actor uses keyword-based detection across 8 categories: AI/ML, Developer Tools, SaaS, Productivity, Design, Fintech, DevTools, and Data. A product is flagged as AI if it matches the AI/ML or Developer Tools patterns. You can set includeAIOnly: false to disable this filter and get all Show HN launches.

Pro Tips

• Daily morning run + Slack webhook = automated "what launched on HN today" briefing
• Filter by isAI: true and sort by votesCount descending to find the day's hottest AI launches
• Track votesCount over time by saving daily runs — spot breakout products early by watching vote velocity
• Set minVotes: 10 on Monday mornings to catch only the launches that gained traction over the weekend
• Combine with Apify's Google Sheets integration to build a searchable historical database of HN launches