Hacker News Scraper 🟠

Search Hacker News by keyword, or pull the top / new / best / Ask HN / Show HN / Jobs lists. Official Hacker News + Algolia APIs, no key required.

This Actor gets you clean, structured Hacker News data two ways: keyword search across stories and comments (with points, comments and date filters), or the live story lists (top, new, best, Ask, Show, Jobs). Great for brand and product monitoring, tech trend research, and building HN datasets.

Uses the official Hacker News Firebase API and the Algolia HN Search API — no key, no login, no browser.

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What you can do with it

• 🔎 Monitor mentions — track your product, company or competitors on HN.
• 📈 Spot trends — search a topic and sort by points or date.
• 🗞️ Mirror the front page — pull top / new / best stories on a schedule.
• 💼 Track HN jobs — pull the "Who is hiring" / Jobs list.
• 🧵 Research discussions — search comments and Ask/Show HN threads.

Features

• ✅ No API key — official public endpoints, works out of the box.
• ✅ Keyword search — stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN, polls, or all.
• ✅ Filters — minimum points, minimum comments, created-after date.
• ✅ Story lists — top, new, best, Ask, Show, Jobs (up to 500 each).
• ✅ Low-maintenance — stable official APIs, one clean record per item.

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Input

Search mode

Field	Description
Search queries	Keywords/phrases, e.g. your product, rust.
What to match	Stories / comments / Ask HN / Show HN / polls / all.
Newest first	Sort by date instead of relevance.
Min points / comments	Keep only items above a threshold.
Created after	Unix timestamp lower bound.

Stories mode

Field	Description
Story lists	top / new / best / ask / show / job.
Stories per list	How many from each (up to 500).

Example — monitor recent mentions of a product

{
  "mode": "search",
  "queries": ["Apify"],
  "searchType": "all",
  "sortByDate": true,
  "minPoints": 5
}

Example — today's top 50 stories

{
  "mode": "stories",
  "storyLists": ["top"],
  "storiesPerList": 50
}

Output

Each row is one story or comment:

{
  "id": "38309611",
  "type": "story",
  "title": "OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman",
  "url": "https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition",
  "hn_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611",
  "author": "davidbarker",
  "points": 5710,
  "num_comments": 2530,
  "text": null,
  "created_at": "2023-11-17T20:28:50Z",
  "matched_query": "openai",
  "source": "search"
}

Run it on a schedule

Schedule the Actor to search your keywords every hour and connect a Slack / email / webhook / Google Sheets integration to get alerted the moment you're mentioned on HN.

Notes & limitations

• Uses the official Hacker News Firebase API and the Algolia HN Search API — no key needed.
• Search covers HN's full history; story lists reflect the current live ranking.
• points and num_comments are point-in-time values.
• This is public Hacker News data.

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Keywords

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