Hacker News Scraper - Stories, Jobs & Comments

Disclaimer: This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Y Combinator or any of its subsidiaries. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. "Hacker News" is referenced only to describe the publicly available website this Actor collects data from.

Pull stories, jobs and comments from Hacker News using the official HN API. Pick a list - Top, Newest, Best, Ask HN, Show HN or Jobs - or paste specific item IDs, and get clean rows with the title, link, score, author, comment count, date, domain and any self-text. No API key, no browser.

What you get per item

Field	Meaning
title / url / hnUrl	Headline, the external link, and the HN discussion link
score / commentCount	Points and number of comments (descendants)
author / createdAt	Submitter and submission time (ISO)
domain	The link's domain (e.g. github.com) - handy for trend analysis
itemType / text	story / job / comment / poll, and self-post or comment text
commentIds / parentId	Child comment IDs and (for comments) the parent

Input

{ "listType": "top", "maxItems": 100 }

• Story list - top, new, best, ask, show or job.
• Item IDs - or paste specific IDs (the number after id= in a news.ycombinator.com URL) to fetch exact items, including comments.
• Import from a file - paste a whole list of IDs, or link a public .txt/.csv, a Google Sheet/Drive link, or an Apify key-value-store record.
• Max items / Minimum score - bound and filter the run.
• Output fields - tick only the columns you want.

Leave everything empty and the run returns a small free sample so you can see the shape first.

Reliability

Reads the official Hacker News API - a public, unmetered Firebase endpoint. No key, no proxy, no anti-bot, nothing to get blocked. A run that returns nothing bills $0.

Honest limits

• Each list is the API's ordered list (Top/New/Best hold up to ~500 items; Ask/Show/Job are shorter). For more history, feed a range of item IDs.
• Comments are fetched by ID. Each item carries its child comment IDs (commentIds); to pull a full thread, feed those IDs back in. The actor does not auto-expand entire comment trees in one run.

Pricing

$0.001 per item on the FREE tier (tiered pricing lowers it with volume). You are only charged for items actually saved; an empty run costs nothing.

Output views

• Items - title, score, comments, author, domain, date and both links.

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

Available through the Apify MCP server - an agent can pull the current HN front page or Ask/Show HN with scores for monitoring or summarisation.

Agent-ready: autonomous payments (x402 & Skyfire)

This actor is agent-ready - AI agents can discover it, run it, and pay for it autonomously, with no Apify account and no human in the loop. It uses pay-per-event pricing and limited permissions, so it qualifies for Apify's agentic-payment standards:

• x402 - an open, HTTP-native payment protocol. Agents pay per run in USDC on the Base network directly through the Apify MCP server - no account, no API key.
• Skyfire - agent-to-service payments for fully autonomous AI-agent workflows.

Building an AI agent, MCP tool, or autonomous data pipeline? This scraper is ready to plug in and pay as it goes.

Automate & schedule

Run this Actor on autopilot and pull results into your own stack:

• Apify API - start runs, fetch datasets and manage schedules over REST.
• apify-client for JavaScript and apify-client for Python - official SDKs.
• Schedules - run it hourly, daily or weekly and keep your dataset current.
• Webhooks - trigger downstream actions (CRM import, Slack alert, email sequence) the moment a run finishes.

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'MY_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('scrapesage/hacker-news-scraper').call({
    "listType": "top",
    "maxItems": 25
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(`Got ${items.length} records`);

Integrate with any app

Connect the dataset to thousands of apps - no code required:

• Make - multi-step automation scenarios.
• Zapier - push new records straight into your CRM or spreadsheet.
• Slack - get notified when a scheduled run finds something new.
• Google Drive / Sheets - auto-export every run to a spreadsheet.
• Airbyte - pipe results into your data warehouse.
• GitHub - trigger runs from commits or releases.

More scrapers from scrapesage

Related Actors in the same category:

• Google News Scraper - Articles, Sources & Monitoring
• Telegram Scraper - Channels, Messages, Media & Search
• Google Trends Scraper - Interest, Regions & Trends
• Substack Scraper - Newsletters, Posts & Creator Leads
• IMDb Scraper - Movies, TV Shows, Ratings, Cast & Box Office

FAQ

How is this Actor billed? Pay-per-event: you pay only for the results it delivers, with no monthly rental and no start fee. The per-event price is shown on the Pricing tab.

Can I schedule it and get results automatically? Yes - create a Schedule and add a webhook or an integration (Google Sheets, Slack, Make, Zapier) to push each run's dataset wherever you need it.

Which export formats are available? Every run's dataset can be downloaded as JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), XML, HTML or RSS from the Apify Console or the API.

Can I run it from code or an AI agent? Yes - through the Apify API and client libraries, or from Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants via the Apify MCP server.

Is it legal to scrape Hacker News? This Actor collects publicly available data only. You are responsible for using the output in compliance with applicable laws (including data-protection law where personal data is involved) and the source's terms. See Data & lawful use and the Disclaimer below.

Is this an official Hacker News tool? No. It is an independent, third-party Actor with no affiliation to, endorsement by or sponsorship from Y Combinator. See the Disclaimer below.

Data & lawful use

This Actor reads only what Hacker News publishes to logged-out visitors: it does not log in, use cookies or session tokens, create accounts, or reach anything behind a sign-in. Names, handles, bios and engagement figures are public, but they relate to identifiable people, so treat the output as personal data. If you are in the EU or UK you are the data controller for what you do with it: have a lawful basis (usually legitimate interest for research, marketing analytics or B2B prospecting), honour access and deletion requests, and do not use the output for spam or unsolicited messaging.

Under Apify's Standard Actor Contract, which governs your use of this Actor, you are the controller of any personal data in your input and output and scrapesage acts only as your processor: that data is processed solely to run your job, written only to your own Apify storage, never used for any other purpose and never shared onward. If you need help with a data-subject request that involves this Actor's output, open an issue on the Issues tab.

Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Y Combinator or any of its subsidiaries. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

"Hacker News" and any related marks are the property of their respective owners and are used here only in a descriptive, nominative sense - to identify the publicly accessible website from which this Actor collects data. This Actor is not an official Hacker News product, is not authorised or certified by Y Combinator, and does not distribute Hacker News software. It collects only publicly available information; you are responsible for ensuring your use of that data complies with applicable laws, regulations and the terms of the source website.

Need help?

Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab, or visit the Apify help center. Feature requests are welcome - this Actor is actively maintained.