Hacker News Scraper

Search or browse Hacker News (stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs, and monthly Who's Hiring threads) using the official Algolia Search API — fast, reliable, no scraping fragility. Pay only per item returned.

Use cases

• Track mentions of your product, company or keyword on HN
• Pull the newest Who's Hiring / Who Wants to Be Hired threads for job-market research
• Feed trending tech discussions into AI agents, newsletters or dashboards
• Build datasets of Show HN launches or Ask HN discussions by topic

Input

Field	Type	Description
queries	array	Keywords to search. Leave empty to just browse by tag/date.
tags	array	story, comment, poll, ask_hn, show_hn, job (default ["story"])
includeComments	boolean	Fetch comment text when tags includes comment
sortBy	string	relevance or date (newest first)
minPoints	integer	Only items with at least this many points
minComments	integer	Only stories with at least this many comments (find high-engagement discussions)
author	string	Only items posted by this exact HN username
postedAfter / postedBefore	string	ISO date bounds
maxItemsPerQuery	integer	Cap per query (up to 1000)
maxResults	integer	Overall cap

Output (one item per story/comment)

{
  "id": "41930211",
  "type": "story",
  "title": "Show HN: FetchSmith – pay-per-use scraper APIs",
  "url": "https://fetchsmith.com",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41930211",
  "author": "someuser",
  "points": 142,
  "numComments": 38,
  "createdAt": "2026-09-01T12:00:00.000Z",
  "query": "fetchsmith"
}

Pricing

result — charged per item returned. Empty queries and failed pages are free.

Tips

• For the current "Who is hiring?" thread: set queries to ["Ask HN: Who is hiring"], tags: ["story"], sortBy: "date", maxItemsPerQuery: 1 to find the thread, or use tags: ["comment"] with postedAfter set to the 1st of the month to pull all replies.
• Use sortBy: "date" for a live monitoring feed of new mentions of your keyword.
• Use author to pull everything a specific user has posted (e.g. track a founder's HN activity), or minComments to surface only high-engagement discussions.

FAQ

Why did my run return 0 items with status SUCCEEDED? The status message distinguishes "no matches for this query/tags/date/points filter" from "the Algolia request failed" — check it before assuming the query is wrong. Can I combine author and minComments? Yes, filters are ANDed together, e.g. author: "pg" + minComments: 50 returns only that user's high-engagement posts. Does this scrape the HN website? No — it uses Algolia's official HN Search API, the same one that powers hn.algolia.com, so there's no scraping fragility to break. Do I get charged for empty queries? No — only items actually returned to the dataset are charged.

Related guides

Engineering write-ups behind this Actor:

• HN's search API: commas mean AND, not OR

Only publicly available data is collected via HN's official search API. Questions or feature requests: support@fetchsmith.com. Also available as a hosted API at https://fetchsmith.com/tools/hacker-news-scraper

Source code: https://github.com/Fetchsmith/fetchsmith/tree/main/actors/hacker-news-scraper