I Built a Pay-Per-Result Hacker News Scraper on Apify

The Problem I needed structured Hacker News data for a side project — trending stories, scores, comment counts. The HN API exists but requires pagination, filtering, and batch fetching logic. So I built an Apify Actor that handles all of this and published it for free. What It Does HN Top Stories Scraper lets you: Scrape top, new, best, ask, and show stories Filter by minimum score , comment count , or keyword Get up to 500 stories per run Output as JSON, CSV, or connect to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier It uses the official HN Firebase API — no scraping, no proxies needed. Example Get the top 50 AI stories with 100+ upvotes: { "count" : 50 , "type" : "top" , "minScore" : 100 , "keyword" : "AI" } Returns: { "id" : 12345678 , "title" : "Show HN: AI tool that does X" , "url" : "https://example.com" , "score" : 342 , "comments" : 89 , "author" : "username" , "hn_url" : "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678" } Use Cases RSS replacement : Schedule runs to get stories as structured da