hackernews
Hacker News API for stories and comments. Use when user mentions "Hacker News", "HN", "Y Combinator", or asks about tech news.
Security Assessment
About hackernews
The hackernews skill provides a streamlined interface to interact with the Hacker News platform, enabling users to fetch stories, comments, and user profiles programmatically. It solves the challenge of manually browsing Hacker News for relevant content by offering direct API access to top, best, new, Ask HN, Show HN, and job stories. Users can retrieve detailed information for individual items or batch queries, making it easier to analyze trends, follow discussions, and track popular content in the tech and startup community.
The skill's main capabilities include fetching story IDs from different categories, retrieving full details for stories, comments, and jobs, accessing user profiles and recent submissions, and monitoring real-time updates through maximum item IDs and recently changed items. Practical examples demonstrate how to pull top stories with scores or filter for high-scoring content. Response fields provide structured information, including item ID, type, author, timestamps, content text, score, comment count, and nested comments, allowing comprehensive data analysis and integration into custom workflows.
Ideal use cases include tracking tech news, aggregating high-impact stories, monitoring Ask HN discussions, analyzing user contributions, and building dashboards for news consumption. Target users range from developers, data analysts, and tech enthusiasts to journalists and researchers who require automated access to Hacker News data. The skill supports integration into scripts, dashboards, and tools where structured access to Hacker News content is valuable.
FAQ
How can I fetch the top Hacker News stories using this skill?
You can fetch the current top stories by calling the topstories API endpoint, which returns the IDs of the top 500 stories. For example, using curl: `curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json" | jq '.[:10]'` retrieves the first 10 IDs.
Can I get details for comments and Ask HN posts?
Yes. By fetching the item details with the item ID, you can access content for stories, comments, and Ask HN posts, including text, author, score, and nested comments.
Is it possible to track user profiles and submissions?
Yes. You can retrieve user profiles with their karma, account creation timestamp, bio, and submitted item IDs. You can also fetch a user's recent submissions by querying the submitted array.
Does the skill provide real-time updates?
The skill supports real-time monitoring by allowing you to fetch the maximum item ID and recently changed items or profiles, which is useful for polling new stories or tracking updates.
Are there any limitations for retrieving multiple stories?
While you can fetch multiple stories with details, it requires sequential API calls for each item ID. Batch retrieval is demonstrated for the top 5 stories, but larger batches may need scripting to handle multiple requests efficiently.
Install hackernews
Quick Setup:
- Copy the skill folder to
.claude/skills/ - Claude will automatically detect and use the skill
Repository
vm0-ai/vm0-skills