Community · 1 skill
Hacker News MCP and Claude skills
Search Hacker News stories and comments for your brand, product or competitors, and post new mentions with their points and comment counts.
Connect Hacker News to your agent (MCP)
- MCP server. Hacker News has no official MCP server. Community servers wrap the same public APIs; since there is no login, one only needs network access.
- Public APIs, no key. The skill calls the Algolia search endpoint for mentions and the Firebase API for item details, and reads the terms to watch from
HN_QUERIES(for exampleacme,acme.com,"Acme CLI"). An agent with web access can also fetch the URLs above directly.
There is no account or token to scope; keep the list of terms short and the schedule daily rather than hourly.
1 Hacker News skill
What agents do with Hacker News
Hacker News has two free, read-only APIs and needs no key. The official API at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/ serves items (stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs, polls) by ID at /v0/item/<id>.json, with by, time, title, url, score, descendants and kids, plus lists such as topstories, newstories, askstories and showstories; it has no search. Search comes from Algolia's HN Search API: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=acme&tags=(story,comment)&numericFilters=created_at_i>1760000000 returns matching stories and comments, newest first, with points, num_comments, author, objectID and the story a comment belongs to. tags=show_hn or tags=ask_hn narrows the type, and /api/v1/search ranks by relevance instead of date.
Founders and marketers schedule a daily digest of new mentions of their product, domain or competitors, a weekly list of the best-performing stories in their space, Show HN launches from competitors, and threads where someone asked about them and nobody from the company replied.
Often used with Hacker News
Teams that use these
Your Hacker News numbers, on one board with everything else
Skills are free to use with any agent. Briefkin is where their results land: one board for every report, number and question your agents send, with a ping when something needs you.
Free during the open beta. No card.