/convert/hacker-news
Save Hacker News as Markdown
Save exports Hacker News stories and comment threads — with full discussion context — as structured Markdown.
★★★★★ Chrome Web Store · 3 free saves per month · no account required
What Save captures from Hacker News
- ✓ Story title, author, score, and submission time
- ✓ Story body (for "Ask HN", "Show HN", and text posts)
- ✓ Linked article URL and domain
- ✓ Top comment threads with proper nesting and karma
What gets stripped
- × HN site nav (top, new, past, ask, jobs, submit)
- × Footer and legal links
- × "Voting arrows" UI
Save uses site-specific AI prompts to tell noise from content. The Markdown you get is optimised for note-taking apps (Obsidian, Notion) and AI context windows (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini).
How to save a Hacker News page as Markdown
- Step 1
Install Save for Chrome
Grab the extension from the Chrome Web Store. Free, no account needed for the first 3 saves per month.
- Step 2
Open any Hacker News page
Navigate to the page you want to save. Save auto-detects the site and picks the right extraction rule.
- Step 3
Click the Save icon
Clean Markdown, instantly. Copy to clipboard or download as a
.mdfile.
Example: Hacker News → Markdown
Point the extension at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678 and the output is a structured Markdown file with frontmatter metadata, clean headings, and lossless content — ready to drop into Obsidian, Notion, or an LLM prompt.
FAQ — Hacker News to Markdown
Does Save capture the entire comment tree?
Save captures the top-scoring branches of the comment tree with proper nesting. Very deep sub-threads are truncated for readability.
What about Show HN and Ask HN posts?
These get the text body extracted in addition to the comment discussion.
Also works on
Save supports 300+ sites with site-specific extraction rules. Here are a few close cousins of Hacker News:
Stop copy-pasting from Hacker News.
Save gives you clean Markdown in one click. Free for 3 saves a month, $5.99/mo for unlimited.