This is a simple script that hits the Hacker News API to pull down the most recent 10,000 Show HN posts.
I used this to hack together some simple, simple analysis (e.g., what keywords are correlated with popular posts?). There's probably a lot of interesting stuff you can do with this.
If you just want the data, and you don't really care how fresh it is, I've also included a CSV. It's just the output of the script from the last time I ran it.
The script can be fairly easily adapted to pull down any kind of content from Hacker News (e.g. comments).