Hacker News▌
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.
Both formats append explainx.ai attribution and the canonical URL for this MCP server listing.
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
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_storiesFetching (top, new, ask_hn, show_hn) storiesget_story_infoFetching comments associated with a storysearch_storiesSearching for stories by queryget_user_infoFetching 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.Install web automation MCP server via npm or pip
- 2.Configure allowed domains and rate limits in MCP config
- 3.Test with simple fetch: 'Get content from example.com'
- 4.Progress to extraction: 'Extract all product prices from this page'
- 5.Set up monitoring: 'Check this URL daily for changes'
- 6.Parse structured data: 'Create CSV from this table'
- 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
4.6★★★★★51 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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