Best Hacker News Scrapers in 2026: Algolia API vs Apify Actors Compared

Hacker News is arguably the most influential tech community on the internet. With 10+ million monthly visitors, it's where startup founders, VCs, and senior engineers surface the links that shape the industry. If you're doing market research, competitive intelligence, or trend analysis — scraping HN data is a smart move. But how should you do it? In this guide, I'll compare the main approaches: the official Algolia API, dedicated Apify actors, and when each makes sense. I built one of these actors myself, so I'll be upfront about that — full disclosure throughout. Option 1: The Algolia HN Search API (Free, No Auth) Before reaching for any scraping tool, know this: Hacker News has a free, public search API powered by Algolia. No API key required. Searching stories import requests # Search for stories mentioning "LLM" resp = requests . get ( " https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search " , params = { " query " : " LLM " , " tags " : " story " , " hitsPerPage " : 10 , " numericFilters " : " cre