Hacker News Scraper — Stories, Keyword Search & Who is Hiring? Jobs

Scrape Hacker News the reliable way: through its own official public APIs, not by parsing fragile HTML. No login, no API key, no proxy, no CAPTCHAs, no IP blocks. If you've been burned by scrapers that break every time a site changes its markup, this one won't, because it never touches the markup at all.

🔍 What you can do with it

• Browse any feed — Top, New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN, or Jobs, with optional minimum-score and domain filters
• Full-text keyword search — search titles, self-text, and comments across all of Hacker News, filtered by author, date range, minimum points, and minimum comment count, sorted by relevance or newest-first
• Who is hiring? extraction — automatically finds the latest monthly hiring thread and returns every job listing as a clean, structured row, optionally filtered by keyword (e.g. "remote", "React", "Series A")
• Comment trees — attach each story's comments, capped to however many you need

🧑‍💻 Who uses this

• Recruiters & talent teams — pull the current "Who is hiring?" thread as structured rows instead of scrolling a giant comment thread by hand
• Market & competitive intelligence — track when your company, product, or competitor gets mentioned, sorted by newest first for daily monitoring
• Tech trend research — pull top stories by score over any time window to see what the developer community is actually paying attention to
• AI / LLM data pipelines — clean, structured JSON output ready to feed into research or training pipelines
• Newsletter & content curators — grab the day's top stories on a schedule and auto-populate a digest

⚡ Why this one, not another HN scraper

Most scrapers on the Store either parse Hacker News' HTML directly (which breaks whenever the site's markup changes and often needs a paid proxy to avoid blocks) or only cover a single feed. This one:

• Uses HN's two official, public, unlimited APIs (Firebase + Algolia), the same ones HN's own front-end uses
• Needs zero proxy configuration — nothing to break, nothing to pay for
• Covers three real modes in one actor: browsing, searching, and hiring-thread extraction, instead of forcing you to combine several tools
• Returns a consistent, unified schema across every mode, so downstream processing stays simple

📥 Input

Field	Applies to	Description
mode	all	list, search, or hiring
storyType	list	top, new, best, ask, show, job
minScore	list	Only include stories at or above this score
domainFilter	list	Only include stories linking to a specific domain
searchQuery	search	Full-text keyword query
searchTags	search	Content types to include: story, comment, poll, show_hn, ask_hn, job
sortByDate	search	Newest-first instead of most-relevant-first
author	search	Restrict to one username
minPoints / minComments	search	Engagement thresholds
dateFrom / dateTo	search	ISO date range
hiringKeyword	hiring	Only return job listings containing this keyword
includeComments	all	Attach each item's comment tree
maxCommentsPerItem	all	Cap comments per item
includeText	all	Include full self-text for Ask HN / Show HN posts
maxItems	all	Max rows returned

🚀 Quick start examples

Browse today's top stories:

{ "mode": "list", "storyType": "top", "maxItems": 50 }

Monitor mentions of your product, newest first:

{ "mode": "search", "searchQuery": "your-product-name", "sortByDate": true, "maxItems": 50 }

Pull remote job listings from the latest hiring thread:

{ "mode": "hiring", "hiringKeyword": "remote", "maxItems": 200 }

📤 Example output

{
    "type": "story",
    "id": 44012345,
    "title": "Why we rewrote our scraper in Rust",
    "author": "some_user",
    "score": 312,
    "numComments": 87,
    "createdAt": "2026-07-10T09:15:00.000Z",
    "url": "https://example.com/blog-post",
    "domain": "example.com",
    "hnDiscussionUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44012345",
    "text": null
}

❓ FAQ

Does this need a proxy or API key? No. Both Firebase and Algolia's HN APIs are public and unauthenticated.

How current is the data? Real-time. Both APIs reflect HN live.

Can I schedule this? Yes, use Apify's built-in Schedules to run it daily or hourly for ongoing monitoring.

Does it cover comments? Yes, set includeComments: true on any mode.

Is this affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News? No. This is an independent tool built on Hacker News' publicly documented APIs.