Hacker News
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.
Integrates with Hacker News to fetch stories, comments, and user data, enabling tech news aggregation, trend analysis, and community engagement tracking.
What it does
- 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
Best for
About Hacker News
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
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.
Tools (4)
Get stories from Hacker News. The options are `top`, `new`, `ask_hn`, `show_hn` for types of stories. This doesn't include the comments. Use `get_story_info` to get the comments.
Get user info from Hacker News, including the stories they've submitted
Search stories from Hacker News. It is generally recommended to use simpler queries to get a broader set of results (less than 5 words). Very targetted queries may not return any results.
Get detailed story info from Hacker News, including the comments
Hacker News MCP Server
A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that provides tools for fetching information from Hacker News.
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"]
}
}
}
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