Save hours each month by turning long Hacker News hiring threads into a clean Airtable list. Great for recruiters, founders, and HR teams who want fresh roles in one place without manual copy and paste.

The setup starts on click, searches the Hacker News index on Algolia for the monthly Who is hiring post, and keeps only the newest thread. It pulls the main post from the Hacker News API, splits all comment IDs, then requests each comment to collect the job text. A Code step cleans the content and an optional Limit keeps tests fast. OpenAI converts the free text into a standard JSON format with fields like company, title, location, type, salary, description, apply URL, and company URL. The results go straight to Airtable as rows you can filter, sort, and share.

You will need an OpenAI API key, an Airtable token, and Algolia headers from the browser network call. Paste the Algolia cURL into the HTTP node or set the headers directly, choose your Airtable base and table, and run a test. Expect a large time cut on sourcing and a consistent dataset you can trust. Use it for recruiting pipelines, curated job emails, and internal hiring dashboards.

• Manual start to safely test runs before you scale
• Algolia search request finds the latest monthly hiring thread
• Filter keeps only the newest post based on title and date
• Hacker News API fetches the main post and all comment IDs
• HTTP requests pull each comment so you get every job entry
• Code step cleans and normalizes text for better parsing
• OpenAI with a structured parser returns consistent JSON fields
• Airtable node writes each job into a table for reporting and sharing

• Reduce manual sourcing from 3 hours to 15 minutes per month
• Automate 90 percent of parsing and data entry tasks
• Improve data accuracy by 80 percent versus manual copy
• Handle thousands of comments without extra work
• Connect Algolia, Hacker News API, OpenAI, and Airtable in one flow
• Standardize every job post into the same fields for easy filtering

1. Import the template into n8n: Create a new workflow in n8n > Click the three dots menu > Select 'Import from File' > Choose the downloaded JSON file.
2. You'll need accounts with OpenAI, Airtable, Algolia and Hacker News API. See the Tools Required section above for links to create accounts with these services.
3. In the n8n credentials manager, create an OpenAI API Key credential. Get your key from your OpenAI account, paste it, and save. Select this credential in the OpenAI Chat Model node.
4. In the n8n credentials manager, create an Airtable Personal Access Token credential. In your Airtable account, create a token with data read and write scopes. Save and select it in the Airtable node.
5. For Algolia, open the Algolia search site for Hacker News in your browser, search for Ask HN Who is hiring with quotes, open the Network tab, and copy the request as cURL. In the HTTP Request node, click Import cURL and paste it. Or create an HTTP Header Auth credential with x-algolia-api-key and set the application ID in headers or query.
6. Open the HTTP Request node named Search for Who is hiring posts and confirm the URL, body, and headers match the Algolia call from your browser. Keep the query with quotes for exact match.
7. Run the workflow with the manual test button and check the Split Out node to confirm you see search hits. You should see the latest monthly thread in the output.
8. Open the Filter node and confirm it keeps only the newest thread. Verify the next node HN API Get Main Post uses the story ID from the selected hit.
9. Inspect the Extract text and Clean text nodes to make sure the comment text looks readable. If you see HTML or odd spacing, adjust the Code node to trim or replace as needed.
10. Check the OpenAI Chat Model and Structured Output Parser connection. Keep the model on gpt 4o mini and confirm the schema includes company, title, location, type, salary, description, apply_url, and company_url.
11. Open the Airtable node and pick your base and table. Map each parsed field to the correct Airtable column. Save the node.
12. Use the Limit node during testing to process a few comments first. Increase or remove it for full runs.
13. Run end to end. Verify new rows appear in Airtable with clean fields. If Algolia returns 401, recheck headers and application ID. If OpenAI parsing fails, retry with cleaned text or reduce token size in the prompt. When stable, add a Cron node if you want monthly scheduling.