Hacker News Top Sites Scraper

Hacker News Top Sites Scraper

by fearless_sharpener

Automatically scrape top stories from Hacker News. Get titles, scores, links, and authors in a structured dataset for trend analysis and research.

935 runs
16 users
Try This Actor

Opens on Apify.com

About Hacker News Top Sites Scraper

Need to keep a pulse on what's trending in tech without refreshing Hacker News all day? I built this scraper for that exact reason. It pulls the top stories from Hacker News, grabbing the post title, score, number of comments, the link (both to the discussion and the external URL), and the author. You get a clean dataset—JSON or CSV—ready to drop into a spreadsheet, feed into your own analysis dashboard, or monitor for emerging trends. It runs reliably on Apify's infrastructure, so you can schedule it to run daily or weekly, ensuring you never miss a top story. I use it to track what technologies are gaining traction, find content ideas, and even discover new tools and libraries that the community is buzzing about. It saves hours of manual checking and gives you structured data you can actually work with, turning community sentiment into actionable insight.

What does this actor do?

Hacker News Top Sites Scraper is a web scraping and automation tool available on the Apify platform. It's designed to help you extract data and automate tasks efficiently in the cloud.

Key Features

  • Cloud-based execution - no local setup required
  • Scalable infrastructure for large-scale operations
  • API access for integration with your applications
  • Built-in proxy rotation and anti-blocking measures
  • Scheduled runs and webhooks for automation

How to Use

  1. Click "Try This Actor" to open it on Apify
  2. Create a free Apify account if you don't have one
  3. Configure the input parameters as needed
  4. Run the actor and download your results

Documentation

Hacker News Top Sites Scraper

Overview

This Apify actor scrapes the Hacker News homepage to extract structured data from the top-ranked news items. It outputs a clean JSON dataset suitable for analysis, monitoring, or integration into other applications.

Key Features

The scraper extracts the following data fields for each news item:
* title: The headline of the post.
* score: The community upvote score.
* link: The URL of the external article or discussion.
* rank: The numerical position on the Hacker News front page.
* ageTitle: A human-readable timestamp (e.g., "3 hours ago").
* author: The username of the submitter.
* numberOfComments: The total count of comments.

How to Use

  1. Ensure you have an Apify account.
  2. Create a new task using this actor as the source.
  3. Run the task. No input configuration is required for basic operation.
  4. Retrieve the scraped data from the task's default dataset storage.

Input/Output

The actor runs with default settings and requires no input parameters. The output is a JSON object containing an array of news items.

Example Output:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "title": "Example News Article",
      "score": "999",
      "link": "https://example.com/news/article",
      "rank": "1",
      "ageTitle": "1 hour ago",
      "author": "example_user",
      "numberOfComments": "42"
    }
  ]
}

Note: This actor scrapes the public Hacker News website, which may change structure or experience downtime. Review Hacker News's terms of service before using this data for commercial or production purposes.

Categories

NEWS

Common Use Cases

Market Research

Gather competitive intelligence and market data

Lead Generation

Extract contact information for sales outreach

Price Monitoring

Track competitor pricing and product changes

Content Aggregation

Collect and organize content from multiple sources

Ready to Get Started?

Try Hacker News Top Sites Scraper now on Apify. Free tier available with no credit card required.

Start Free Trial

Actor Information

Developer
fearless_sharpener
Pricing
Paid
Total Runs
935
Active Users
16

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