Hacker News Thread Exporter
Paste a Hacker News link and download every comment in the thread as a CSV, with who wrote it, when, and where it sits in the conversation.
How the Hacker News thread exporter works
- 1
Copy the thread link
Open the story or any comment on news.ycombinator.com and copy the address. The link of a single comment exports that comment and everything under it.
- 2
Paste it and press Get comments
Your browser asks the public Algolia Hacker News API for the whole tree in one request, then lays it out row by row in thread order.
- 3
Download the CSV
Every comment, not just the preview, with its depth and parent so you can rebuild the conversation in Excel or Google Sheets.
Data You Can Extract
| Field | Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
| ID | Hacker News's id for the story or comment | text |
| Parent ID | The comment or story this one replies to | text |
| Depth | 0 for the item you pasted, 1 for direct replies, and so on | number |
| Type | story, comment, poll or job | text |
| Author | The public HN username, empty when the comment was deleted | text |
| Created (UTC) | When it was posted | date |
| Title | The story title, on the first row only | text |
| Text | The comment as plain text, with links written out in full | text |
| URL | The story link, on the first row only | url |
| Points | The story’s points; HN keeps comment points private | number |
| Replies | How many direct replies it has | number |
| Permalink | The comment’s own link on Hacker News | url |
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. There is no sign-up, no payment and no cap on thread size. A thread of several thousand comments downloads as one CSV.
From the public Algolia Hacker News API (hn.algolia.com), the same index behind the search box at the bottom of Hacker News. Your browser fetches it directly; the thread never passes through InsightSocial’s servers and we keep nothing.
Yes. The API returns the whole tree regardless of what the page has expanded, and every reply keeps its depth and parent ID.
Algolia’s copy of Hacker News usually catches up within minutes. Comments posted in the last few minutes, and recent edits, can be missing until then; run the export again a little later.
Those are deleted or flagged comments. They stay in the file as empty rows so the replies under them keep their place in the thread.
Hacker News does not publish comment points. Only the story itself has a points count, on the first row.
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