Hacker News
What it is
A read-only Hacker News connector. Your agent searches stories and comments, reads a thread with its comments in Hacker News's own order, checks an account before a Show HN, reads the live front page and where an item ranks on it, lists every story ever submitted for your site, and watches a launch thread for new comments. It reads Hacker News's two public APIs, Algolia search and the official Firebase API, and needs no account or key.
What it contains
- Tools:
hn_search,hn_item,hn_user,hn_front,hn_domain,hn_thread_since. Every one is a read. - Skill
hackernews: when to use each tool and the search traps (quoted terms, the 1,000-hit cap, estimated counts, comments without scores).
Who can use it
Anyone. Off by default; turn it on in Plugins. No sign-in, no key, no cookies.
Limits and risks
- It cannot submit, comment, vote or flag, by design: Hacker News asks for hand-written text, so you write and post everything yourself.
- Algolia allows about 10,000 requests an hour per IP and returns at most 1,000 hits per query; the tools say when a search is past that cap.
- Hit counts are Algolia's estimates. Comments have no public score.
- New comments reach Algolia's index about a minute after they are posted.
- Dead items, the second-chance pool and your own
/threadspage are read with the Browser pack, not these tools.
Build and test
No build step: the host loads index.ts. Tests stub fetch and run the tools:
cd packs/hackernews && bun test