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WARN Firehose

Every US layoff notice in one searchable database

Details

External ID
47116026
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
WARN Firehose
Website domain
warnfirehose.com
Launched
Feb. 22, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
134
Upvotes percentile
0.9198113207547169
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

Hi HN,I built WARN Firehose because I was frustrated trying to track layoff data across the US. The WARN Act requires companies with 100+ employees to file public notices 60 days before mass layoffs — but the data is scattered across 50 state websites with different formats, broken links, and no API.WARN Firehose scrapes every state workforce agency daily and normalizes the data into a single database going back to 1988. It now has 131,000+ notices covering 14 million workers.*What you can do:*- Browse interactive charts and data tables (no account needed): https://warnfirehose.com/data - Drill into any state, city, company, or industry: https://warnfirehose.com/data/layoffs - Query the REST API (free tier: 100 calls/day): https://warnfirehose.com/docs - Export in CSV, JSON, NDJSON, Parquet, or JSON-LD - Set up webhooks for real-time alerts on new filings*Who uses this:*- Journalists breaking layoff stories before press releases - Quant funds using WARN filings as an alternative data signal (filings happen ~60 days before layoffs) - Recruiters sourcing from displaced talent pools - Researchers studying labor market dynamics - Workforce development boards doing rapid response planning*Tech stack:* Python/FastAPI, SQLite, scrapers for all 50 states, static HTML generation for SEO pages, Claude Haiku for AI analysis, deployed on EC2.Free tier is genuinely useful (100 API calls/day, dashboard access, charts). Paid plans start at $19/mo for full historical data and bulk exports.Would love feedback on the API design, data quality, or anything else. Happy to answer questions.

Enrichment

Theme
Vertical
HR & recruiting
Function
Search & retrieval
Audience
B2B
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
searchable layoff notice database
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial The dashboard and basic web scrapers can be vibe-coded, but maintaining robust, continuously updated scraping pipelines across 50 disparate state government websites with custom formats, broken links, and anti-scraping defenses is a major data engineering challenge.

What it would actually take: A production version requires an ETL pipeline (e.g., using Prefect or Dagster) orchestrating 50+ custom extractors capable of parsing HTML tables, PDFs, and Excel sheets. Scrapers need rotating proxies, PDF OCR capabilities, and anomaly detection alerts to detect silent structural changes on state sites. Continuous engineering effort is needed to update brittle parsing logic whenever state labor department websites redesign.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Layoff.fyi, WarnTracker, Fucked Company

Concerns raised: Data incomplete - only ~10% of actual layoffs captured in WARN notices, Data integrity issues - charts show inconsistent numbers across views, WARN Act doesn't capture all layoffs, especially small ones or AI displacement, LLM-generated data accuracy unverifiable for statistics/numbers, Reports claim accuracy but don't match state official WARN notices

Feature requests: Filter/search by company name, Data quality improvements and normalization, UI fixes for chart displays, Validation warranty matching state official notices

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 79 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #7 of 80 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 115 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product