Hacker News Intelligence 🟠

🎉 Turn Hacker News into clean, structured intelligence — no login, no API key, one row per item, with the title, author, points, comments and links. Built for developer-tool marketing, hiring and tech research.

🔍 What is the Hacker News Intelligence — and when should you use it?

Give this actor keywords or topics and it returns matching items from public Hacker News posts and comments — as clean, deduplicated rows you can filter, export or feed to an AI agent. Every run queries the source live, so the data is as fresh as the registry itself.

Use it when you need: a HN item company list for outreach; formation / status monitoring; or a canonical registry record for KYB and due diligence.

Use something else when: you need private analytics — this reads public Hacker News content only.

🤖 Use with AI agents

Already on the Apify MCP server? Ask for this Actor by name: foxlabs/hackernews-intelligence.

Your agent can pay for its own runs. This Actor is pay-per-event with agentic payments, so an agent can discover it, run it and settle the bill over x402 (USDC on Base) or Skyfire — no Apify account or API token of its own. Billing is the same either way: per delivered record, never for errors.

Otherwise paste this into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP-enabled assistant:

I want to pull HN item company records using the Apify Actor `foxlabs/hackernews-intelligence`.
Input: `queries` is a list of keywords or topics. `maxResultsPerQuery` caps rows per query.
Start with: {"queries":["undefined"],"maxResultsPerQuery":50}
Ask me what to look up, run the Actor, then summarise the rows as a table.

The machine-readable API, MCP config and OpenAPI definition live at apify.com/foxlabs/hackernews-intelligence.md.

📋 Overview

Everything you need to turn public Hacker News posts and comments into clean, structured data — in one actor, with no login, cookies or API key.

Why teams pick this actor:

• ✅ Whole feed, one call — name or ID in, matching items out.
• 🧹 No empty-promise columns — only fields this registry actually fills; degenerate columns are removed.
• 🔗 Stable identifiers — every row carries the source's own IDs, ready to join across runs and to other Fox Labs actors.
• 💰 Pay only for results — per-row pricing, empty/failed lookups never billed.
• 🤖 Agent-ready — MCP + x402 agentic payments.

✨ Features

• 🔍 Name or ID lookup — relevance-ranked name search or exact registry-ID lookup.
• 🏢 Full entity profile — status, legal form, formation date, address and the registry’s own contact fields.
• 🧹 Clean schema — deduplicated camelCase rows, ready for CSV/Excel/JSON.

🎬 Quick Start

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/foxlabs~hackernews-intelligence/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"queries":["undefined"],"maxResultsPerQuery":50}'

🚀 Getting Started (3 steps)

1. Choose your targets — keywords or topics.
2. Set the cap — maxResultsPerQuery limits rows per query.
3. Run and export — get a clean dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

📥 Input

{"queries":["undefined"],"maxResultsPerQuery":50}

Field	Type	Description
queries	array	Keywords or topics.
maxResultsPerQuery	integer	Caps rows per query.
maxConcurrency	integer	How many queries to fetch at once.
includeRaw	boolean	Attach the source’s untouched record under raw.

📤 Output

One row per company, saved to the dataset. Every row also carries query, scrapedAt, and — when a lookup fails — an error explaining why (never silently dropped, never billed).

Field	Description
type	Type
threadId	Thread Id
threadTitle	Thread Title
company	Company
headline	Headline
roleLine	Role Line
remote	Remote
urls	Urls
author	Author
hnUrl	Hn Url
createdAt	Created At
text	Text
fetchedAt	Fetched At

💼 Use cases

1. Launch monitoring — track HN discussion of a product. Input: product keywords. Output: items + points + comments. Use: a launch dashboard.

2. Hiring signals — read "Who is hiring" threads. Input: keywords. Output: items + text. Use: a hiring list.

3. Tech trends — spot rising topics on HN. Input: topic keywords. Output: items over time. Use: a trend report.

🔗 Integration

JavaScript / Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('foxlabs/hackernews-intelligence').call({"queries":["undefined"],"maxResultsPerQuery":50});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items[0]);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient('YOUR_TOKEN')
run = client.actor('foxlabs/hackernews-intelligence').call(run_input={"queries":["undefined"],"maxResultsPerQuery":50})
for item in client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).iterate_items():
    print(item)

Automation (n8n / Zapier / Make): schedule or webhook → HTTP request to the actor API with your queries → handle the JSON dataset → push to a sheet, CRM or dashboard.

📊 Pricing

Pay-per-event: per delivered record. Empty or failed lookups are never billed. View current pricing.

❓ FAQ

Do I need an account, login or API key? No. This reads public Hacker News posts and comments.

What do I search by? Keywords or topics.

How current is the data? Every run queries the source live, so results are as fresh as the registry.

What does each row cover? One HN item: title, author, points, comment count, URL and text where present.

Can I export to CSV / Excel / JSON? Yes — directly from the Apify dataset.

🐛 Troubleshooting

• Fewer rows than expected — raise maxResultsPerQuery, or refine the name.
• A name returns an unexpected entity — it matched a similar registered name; search the exact registry ID.
• No rows for a name — try the entity’s exact legal name or its registry ID.

⚖️ Is it legal to scrape this data?

This actor reads public Hacker News posts and comments. Results can still contain personal data (e.g. a person’s name); personal data is protected by the GDPR and similar laws, so only process it with a legitimate basis. See Apify’s blog post on the legality of web scraping.

🤝 Support & contact

• 🌐 Website: data.foxlabs.com.tr
• 📧 Email: info@foxlabs.com.tr
• 🐛 Issues: open a ticket in the Actor’s Issues tab
• 🧰 More clean B2B data actors: Fox Labs on Apify

Changelog

0.2 — 2026-09-07

• Dropped empty-promise columns. Removed emails — public Hacker News posts and comments does not carry them, so they were shipped as always-null columns. Only fields this source actually fills are now emitted.
• Enabled AI-agent payments (x402) + rebuilt the README to the full standard (What-is / when, AI-agents + x402 agentic payments + MCP, Overview, Features, Use cases, Integration, FAQ, Troubleshooting, Support & contact).

0.0

• Initial release: data from public Hacker News posts and comments by name or registry ID.