Hacker News is where a technical audience says the quiet part out loud. Mine the threads for angles.
Hacker News comments are written by a skeptical, technical crowd that says exactly what it thinks, the tool they'd use instead, the claim they don't buy, the edge case that breaks your pitch. Adlicio reads the comments under any public Hacker News thread and ranks the patterns into structured ad angles, each tagged with the tension, the objection, and a candidate hook line. No API key, no code.
Browser-based. No Hacker News API. Your first brief in 60 seconds.
Why Hacker News comments are worth mining
Hacker News is one of the few public places where a technical audience argues in the open about what's actually good, what's overhyped, and what they'd reach for instead. The comments under a thread about your category are a blunt list of the objections, the alternatives, and the trade-offs that decide whether a technical buyer takes you seriously.
That signal is gold for a developer or B2B product, and almost no one mines it, because reading across hundreds of comments by hand is slow. Adlicio reads the public comments under the threads that match your topic and runs them through the same angle engine as the rest of the platform, clustering the recurring objections and comparisons and ranking them into a brief you can test as ad copy or paste straight into Claude.
What you can do with Hacker News comments
- Mine the threads about your category for the objections a technical buyer raises first, then write your hook to meet the skepticism head on.
- Pull the tools people say they'd use instead to map the real competitive set and position against it by name.
- Lift the verbatim language a technical audience uses about a problem to write copy that sounds credible to engineers, not like marketing.
- Build an objection bank from the most critical comments so every campaign opens against the hardest doubt, not the easiest one.
Hacker News scraper FAQ
Does this need the Hacker News API?
No, you don't have to touch it. Adlicio reads the publicly visible comments on a thread, the same content any visitor sees, with no setup and no code.
What can it pull from Hacker News?
The public comments under a thread, the text and who wrote it, which feed the same angle engine used for every other source.
Why mine Hacker News for ad angles?
Because a technical audience states objections plainly and names the alternatives, the exact things a credible ad to that audience has to answer. Few competitors read it, so the angles you find there are rarely overused.
Is scraping Hacker News comments allowed?
Adlicio reads publicly visible comments and takes no action on your behalf, it doesn't post, vote, or reply. It reads what's already public, just across far more comments at once.
What do I actually get back?
A structured brief: the recurring objections, alternatives, and comparisons ranked by frequency, the angles each supports, and the verbatim Hacker News quotes behind them, ready to test as ad copy or drop into Claude or ChatGPT.
Turn Hacker News comments into your next ad angle.
Get started free. No credit card. Mine Hacker News alongside 15+ other platforms in one brief.
Free to start. No credit card.
product URL, competitor, or keyword
- Buyer repeat
- pain stack
- Belief gap
- objection map
- First test
- hook + brief