Job data guides · Updated 2026-10-13

Hacker News Who is hiring as data: every job post as JSON

Each month Hacker News runs an "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread where companies post jobs as comments. There is no separate jobs API, but the thread is an ordinary story, so the free Hacker News API returns every post as JSON without a key.

Step by step

1. Find the thread. The HN Search API call above returns the latest stories by whoishiring. In August, September and October 2026 there were two each month: "Who is hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?". Pick the hit whose title starts with Ask HN: Who is hiring? and keep its objectID.
2. Read the story from the official API: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/49922569.json. The kids array holds the IDs of the top-level comments. Each top-level comment is one job post. Replies under a post are questions, not jobs.
3. Read each post: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{kid}.json. A post has by (the author), time (Unix seconds) and text (HTML). Skip posts with deleted or dead set to true; 49 of the 310 October posts were like that.
4. Split the first line. The thread asks posters to start with Company | Role | Location | Remote | Salary-style fields separated by |. In the October 2026 thread, about 30 of the 261 visible posts did not follow this, so keep the full text as well.

Copy and paste script (Node.js 18+)

// node hn-hiring.mjs > jobs.json
const s = await (await fetch('https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story,author_whoishiring&hitsPerPage=5')).json();
const thread = s.hits.find(h => h.title.startsWith('Ask HN: Who is hiring?'));
const story = await (await fetch(`https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/${thread.objectID}.json`)).json();
const posts = [];
for (const id of story.kids) {
  const c = await (await fetch(`https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/${id}.json`)).json();
  if (!c || c.deleted || c.dead) continue;
  const text = c.text.replace(/<p>/g, '\n').replace(/<[^>]+>/g, '')
    .replace(/&#x2F;/g, '/').replace(/&#x27;/g, "'").replace(/&quot;/g, '"')
    .replace(/&gt;/g, '>').replace(/&lt;/g, '<').replace(/&amp;/g, '&');
  const [company, role, location] = text.split('\n')[0].split('|').map(x => x.trim());
  posts.push({ id, author: c.by, company, role, location, text, url: `https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=${id}` });
}
console.log(JSON.stringify(posts, null, 2));

We ran this on 2026-10-13: it returned 261 posts from the October 2026 thread in about one minute, because it reads the posts one by one. The official API says it has no rate limit at the moment, but be polite and do not run it in a tight loop.

What the October 2026 thread looks like

"Mentions remote" is not the same as "is remote": many posts say "no remote" or "remote within the US only". Read the location field before you filter.

Common problems

• Wrong thread: "Who wants to be hired?" is posted by the same account at the same minute, so its ID is usually one lower. Match the title, not the time.
• HTML in text: text is HTML with entities such as / for /. Paragraphs are separated by <p>, and links are <a> tags.
• No fixed fields: the | header is a convention. Some posts put the role first, some write a paragraph. Remote, salary and visa need their own rules.
• Posts change: companies edit and delete posts during the month, and new posts keep coming for weeks. Read the thread again and keep only IDs you have not seen.
• Several months: you need one loop per thread, plus de-duplication when the same company posts every month.
• Email addresses: many posts include a contact email for applicants. Use it to apply, not for mailing lists.

Who is hiring as a ready dataset

We also run the Hacker News Scraper on Apify, a paid hosted version. Its Who is hiring mode reads the latest thread or the last N months and returns one row per post with company, role, location, remote (yes, no or hybrid), salary text, visa, employment type and company URL. You can filter by keyword, location and remote, and a new-items-only mode returns just the posts added since your last run. Email addresses in post text are replaced with [email hidden]. It costs $0.20 per 1,000 results.

Open Hacker News Scraper Company career pages: 13 ATS APIs

FAQ

Sources: Hacker News API documentation; HN Search API; our own requests on 2026-10-13.