Hacker News extraction API
Hacker News Scraper - Extract Stories, Profiles & Feeds
Extract public Hacker News stories, profiles, listings, and story-search pages into clean Markdown or schema-versioned JSON with scores, comment counts, and source links.
Live playground
Try Hacker News extraction.
Use an example or paste your own public URL. The playground calls the same cacheable GET API your agent will use.
Supported inputs
Built for normal public URLs.
- Public Hacker News story and profile URLs
- Front-page, newest, best, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs, submission, favorite, and site listings
- Public story-search URLs with relevance or newest ordering
- Scores, comment counts, source links, Markdown, and schema-versioned JSON
Clear boundaries
Know exactly what to expect.
- No comment bodies, comment search, or complete discussion trees
- Story feeds contain at most 30 items and profiles contain at most 20 recent submissions
- No account data, voting, posting, complete user history, crawling, or media downloads
One GET request
Add Hacker News data to your agent.
No SDK and no account are required during the public preview. Choose JSON for typed entities or Markdown for direct model context.
Read the quickstartcurl --get 'https://api.webstractor.com/v1/extract' \
--data-urlencode 'url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1' \
--data-urlencode 'format=json'const params = new URLSearchParams({
url: 'https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1',
format: 'json',
});
const response = await fetch(
`https://api.webstractor.com/v1/extract?${params}`,
);
const data = await response.json();from json import load
from urllib.parse import urlencode
from urllib.request import urlopen
params = urlencode({
"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1",
"format": "json",
})
with urlopen(f"https://api.webstractor.com/v1/extract?{params}") as response:
data = load(response)Common questions
Hacker News scraper FAQ
What Hacker News URLs can webstractor.com process?
Stories, Profiles, Story listings, Story search. Use an ordinary public URL from the platform.
What does the Hacker News extraction API return?
One story, one profile with recent submissions, or a feed containing up to 30 stories. Choose raw Markdown or schema-versioned JSON for every request.
What are the limits of Hacker News extraction?
No comment bodies, comment search, or complete discussion trees. Story feeds contain at most 30 items and profiles contain at most 20 recent submissions. No account data, voting, posting, complete user history, crawling, or media downloads.
More sources