Hacker News Front Page

The Hacker News front page is arguably the most influential curation of technology news on the internet. A post that reaches the front page has been upvoted by thousands of technologists - software engineers, startup founders, venture capitalists, and researchers - who collectively decide what matters in tech on any given day. The front page turns over several times daily, and missing a post means missing the conversation.

What it extracts

• Position — Rank position on the Hacker News front page (#1, #2, #3, etc.).
• News Title — Title of the Hacker News submission.
• News Link — The website URL the post links to.
• Source — The domain of the website being linked to.

What you can do with it

• Daily tech pulse capture: Extract the front page at the same time each day to create a consistent record of what the tech community considers most important.
• Source domain analysis: See which websites consistently reach the HN front page - personal blogs, major publications, GitHub repos, or startup announcements.
• Engagement benchmarking: Score and comment counts tell you how much discussion a topic generates. Track which themes drive the deepest conversations.
• Trend archiving: The front page is ephemeral. Scheduled extractions preserve what appeared and when, creating an analyzable timeline of tech discourse.

How it works

Just run the flow. It loads the source, extracts the fields listed above, and saves them as a CSV in your home folder.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from the keyword search scraper?

This robot captures the current front page - whatever is trending right now. The keyword scraper finds historical posts matching specific search terms.

How often does the front page change?

The HN front page evolves continuously as posts gain and lose votes. Extracting 2-3 times per day captures the major cycles.

Can I extract the 'Best' or 'Show HN' pages too?

Yes. Navigate to any HN listing page - front page, best, new, show, ask - and copy the URL. The robot extracts whatever page you provide.

Does it capture the post URLs?

Yes. The robot extracts both the source URL (where the story links to) and the Hacker News discussion URL for each post.

Is this Hacker News scraper free?

Browse AI's free plan includes credits to run this robot. No credit card required.