I Built a Free Tool to Search All HN 'Who is Hiring?' Posts at Once

If you've ever tried to job hunt through Hacker News 'Who is Hiring?' threads, you know the pain: 200+ comments per month, across 24 months of archives, no search, no filters.

So I built HN Startup Hunter — a free search tool that indexes all of them.

What it does

• Searches all HN hiring threads (2024–2026, 24+ months)
• Filters by tech stack: Python, Rust, React, etc.
• Filters by work type: Remote, Contract, Part-time
• Extracts direct contact emails where visible
• Shows company names, locations, equity mentions

Why I built it

I was looking for contract Python/data engineering work and kept bouncing between Ctrl+F on individual HN threads. The official HN search is OK but doesn't filter by remote/contract/specific stack.

The scraper runs nightly and pulls fresh data from the current month's thread as it fills up.

How it works

import requests

def fetch_hn_thread(story_id):
    url = f'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{story_id}.json'
    story = requests.get(url).json()

    comments = []
    for kid_id in story.get('kids', []):
        comment = requests.get(
            f'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{kid_id}.json'
        ).json()
        if comment and comment.get('text'):
            comments.append(comment)

    return comments

def extract_email(text):
    import re
    emails = re.findall(r'[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}', text)
    return emails[0] if emails else None

The Flask app wraps this in a UI with Elasticsearch-style filtering.

The result

https://hn-startup-hunter.onrender.com — free, no login needed.

Done-for-you option

If you'd rather have someone else do the research: I offer a $75 custom lead report — 20 companies matching your specific skills, with contact info, tech stack details, and 3-line summaries. Delivered in 24h.

Useful if you're doing a targeted job search and want a pre-filtered, personalized starting list.

---

Feedback welcome! The tool is early-stage so if you find bugs or want features, drop a comment.