search-web

Hacker News

erithwik

by erithwik

Integrate with Hacker News to track ai trends, analyze artificial intelligence trends, and engage with top tech stories

Integrates with Hacker News to fetch stories, comments, and user data, enabling tech news aggregation, trend analysis, and community engagement tracking.

github stars

65

0 commentsdiscussion

Both formats append explainx.ai attribution and the canonical URL for this MCP server listing.

No API key neededLive data from official HN APIOne-command setup with npx

best for

  • / AI tools analyzing tech trends and discussions
  • / Automated content research and summarization
  • / Building HN-based applications or bots

capabilities

  • / Fetch top, new, Ask HN, and Show HN stories
  • / Retrieve comment threads and discussions
  • / Get user profiles and posting history
  • / Browse job postings
  • / Filter content by type and recency
  • / Access formatted responses with discussion links

what it does

Retrieves live Hacker News data including stories, comments, and user profiles through the official Firebase API. Lets AI tools access and analyze current HN content with filtering options.

about

Hacker News is a community-built MCP server published by erithwik that provides AI assistants with tools and capabilities via the Model Context Protocol. Integrate with Hacker News to track ai trends, analyze artificial intelligence trends, and engage with top tech stories It is categorized under search web. This server exposes 4 tools that AI clients can invoke during conversations and coding sessions.

how to install

You can install Hacker News in your AI client of choice. Use the install panel on this page to get one-click setup for Cursor, Claude Desktop, VS Code, and other MCP-compatible clients. This server runs locally on your machine via the stdio transport.

license

MIT

Hacker News is released under the MIT license. This is a permissive open-source license, meaning you can freely use, modify, and distribute the software.

readme

Hacker News MCP Server

smithery badge

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that provides tools for fetching information from Hacker News.

<a href="https://glama.ai/mcp/servers/e0rco8dfgt"><img width="380" height="200" src="https://glama.ai/mcp/servers/e0rco8dfgt/badge" alt="mcp-hn MCP server" /></a>

Tools

  • get_stories Fetching (top, new, ask_hn, show_hn) stories
  • get_story_info Fetching comments associated with a story
  • search_stories Searching for stories by query
  • get_user_info Fetching user info

Example Usage

Use prompts like the following:

User: Get the top stories of today
  Output: Uses `get_stories` tool and returns a story about AI
User: What does the details of the story today that talks about the future of AI
  Output: Uses `get_story_info` tool based on the results of the previous tool
User: What has the user `pg` been up to?
  Output: Uses `get_user_info` tool and returns a summary of the user's activity
User: What does hackernews say about careers in AI?
  Output: Uses `search_stories` tool and returns a summary of the comments

A more detailed example with the puppeteer MCP server:

User: What are the top stories of today?
  Output: Uses `get_stories` tool and returns a story about AI
User: Can you use the puppeteer tool to read the article about <AI> and also use the hackernews tool to view the comments and give me a summary of what the main comments are about the article?
  Output: Uses puppeteer tool to read the article about AI and then uses the `get_story_info` hn tool to get the comments and returns a summary of the comments

Quickstart

Installing via Smithery

To install Hacker News MCP Server for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:

npx -y @smithery/cli install mcp-hn --client claude

Claude Desktop:

Update the following:

On MacOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

With the following for production:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-hn": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["mcp-hn"]
    }
  }
}

FAQ

What is the Hacker News MCP server?
Hacker News is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server profile on explainx.ai. MCP lets AI hosts (e.g. Claude Desktop, Cursor) call tools and resources through a standard interface; this page summarizes categories, install hints, and community ratings.
How do MCP servers relate to agent skills?
Skills are reusable instruction packages (often SKILL.md); MCP servers expose live capabilities. Teams frequently combine both—skills for workflows, MCP for APIs and data. See explainx.ai/skills and explainx.ai/mcp-servers for parallel directories.
How are reviews shown for Hacker News?
This profile displays 51 aggregated ratings (sample rows for discoverability plus signed-in user reviews). Average score is about 4.6 out of 5—verify behavior in your own environment before production use.

Use Cases

Web Research & Information Gathering

Fetch and extract information from websites automatically

Example

Research competitor pricing, scrape product reviews, monitor news mentions

Automate 5-10 hours/week of manual web research

Content Monitoring & Alerts

Track website changes, new content, price updates

Example

Monitor competitor blog for new posts, track stock availability, watch for pricing changes

Stay informed without manual checking, never miss important updates

Data Extraction & Aggregation

Extract structured data from multiple websites

Example

Compile product listings from 10 e-commerce sites, aggregate job postings, collect real estate data

Build datasets 100x faster than manual copying

API-less Integration

Interact with services that don't offer APIs

Example

Check form submissions, validate website functionality, test user flows

Automate interactions with any website, even without API

Implementation Guide

Prerequisites

  • Claude Desktop or Cursor with MCP support
  • Understanding of web scraping ethics and robots.txt
  • Rate limiting awareness to avoid overwhelming target sites
  • Knowledge of legal restrictions on data collection

Time Estimate

20-40 minutes including configuration and testing

Installation Steps

  1. 1.Install web automation MCP server via npm or pip
  2. 2.Configure allowed domains and rate limits in MCP config
  3. 3.Test with simple fetch: 'Get content from example.com'
  4. 4.Progress to extraction: 'Extract all product prices from this page'
  5. 5.Set up monitoring: 'Check this URL daily for changes'
  6. 6.Parse structured data: 'Create CSV from this table'
  7. 7.Respect robots.txt and rate limits always

Troubleshooting

  • 403 Forbidden: Website blocks bots—respect their wishes, use official API instead
  • Rate limit errors: Slow down requests, add delays between fetches
  • Stale data: Target site changed HTML structure—update selectors
  • Timeout errors: Site is slow or blocking—increase timeout, try different user agent
  • JavaScript-rendered content: Use headless browser MCP servers for dynamic sites

Best Practices

✓ Do

  • +Check robots.txt and respect crawl rules
  • +Rate limit requests: 1-2 requests/second maximum
  • +Use official APIs when available instead of scraping
  • +Identify your bot with descriptive user agent
  • +Cache results to minimize repeated requests
  • +Handle errors gracefully with retries and fallbacks
  • +Validate extracted data for accuracy

✗ Don't

  • Don't scrape sites that explicitly forbid it (robots.txt, ToS)
  • Don't overwhelm servers with rapid requests—use rate limiting
  • Don't scrape personal data without consent and legal basis
  • Don't ignore copyright on extracted content
  • Don't assume HTML structure is stable—handle changes
  • Don't use scraped data for commercial purposes without permission

💡 Pro Tips

  • Use CSS selectors or XPath for robust data extraction
  • Set up monitoring alerts for extraction failures (structure changed)
  • Implement exponential backoff for retries on failures
  • Store raw HTML for reprocessing if extraction logic changes
  • Combine with data analysis tools for insights from extracted data
  • Consider using official APIs or RSS feeds as more stable alternatives

Technical Details

Architecture

MCP server handles HTTP requests, HTML parsing, JavaScript rendering (if headless browser), and returns structured data to Claude.

Protocols

  • HTTP/HTTPS
  • WebSocket (for real-time sites)
  • Puppeteer/Playwright (for JavaScript sites)

Compatibility

  • Static HTML sites
  • JavaScript-rendered SPAs (with headless browser)
  • REST APIs
  • GraphQL endpoints

When to Use This

✓ Use When

Use for research automation, content monitoring, data aggregation from multiple sources, and when official APIs don't exist. Best for read-only information gathering.

✗ Avoid When

Avoid for sites with APIs (use API instead), sites that explicitly forbid scraping, when data is copyrighted, or for login-required content without proper authorization.

Integration

  • Scheduled monitoring with change detection
  • Multi-source data aggregation pipelines
  • Fallback to web scraping when API rate limits hit
  • Headless browser for JavaScript-heavy sites

Discussion

Product Hunt–style comments (not star reviews)
  • No comments yet — start the thread.

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Ratings

4.651 reviews
  • Aisha Li· Dec 28, 2024

    Hacker News reduced integration guesswork — categories and install configs on the listing matched the upstream repo.

  • Mia Khan· Dec 20, 2024

    Hacker News has been reliable for tool-calling workflows; the MCP profile page is a good permalink for internal docs.

  • Aisha Rao· Dec 16, 2024

    I recommend Hacker News for teams standardizing on MCP; the explainx.ai page compares cleanly with sibling servers.

  • Yash Thakker· Dec 12, 2024

    Hacker News is a well-scoped MCP server in the explainx.ai directory — install snippets and categories matched our Claude Code setup.

  • Mei Iyer· Dec 4, 2024

    According to our notes, Hacker News benefits from clear Model Context Protocol framing — fewer ambiguous “AI plugin” claims.

  • Yuki Johnson· Nov 19, 2024

    According to our notes, Hacker News benefits from clear Model Context Protocol framing — fewer ambiguous “AI plugin” claims.

  • Aisha Sethi· Nov 19, 2024

    We wired Hacker News into a staging workspace; the listing’s GitHub and npm pointers saved time versus hunting across READMEs.

  • Aisha Jackson· Nov 15, 2024

    Hacker News has been reliable for tool-calling workflows; the MCP profile page is a good permalink for internal docs.

  • Aisha Robinson· Nov 7, 2024

    We evaluated Hacker News against two servers with overlapping tools; this profile had the clearer scope statement.

  • Dhruvi Jain· Nov 3, 2024

    Useful MCP listing: Hacker News is the kind of server we cite when onboarding engineers to host + tool permissions.

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