hn
Browse Hacker News - top stories, new, best, ask, show, jobs, and story details with comments.
Why use this skill?
Browse Hacker News top stories, search technical discussions, and view comment threads directly from your terminal with this OpenClaw AI skill.
Install via CLI (Recommended)
clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/dbhurley/hnWhat This Skill Does
The Hacker News (hn) skill for OpenClaw provides a powerful command-line interface for interacting with the Hacker News ecosystem directly from your terminal or AI-driven environment. By utilizing the official Hacker News API, this skill allows users to fetch top stories, monitor new submissions, explore specialized feeds like Ask HN or Show HN, and dive into detailed comment threads. Designed to be lightweight and fast, it bridges the gap between web-based news consumption and developer-centric workflows, ensuring that you can keep your pulse on the latest tech trends without ever leaving your command line environment.
Installation
To integrate the Hacker News skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal:
clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/dbhurley/hn
Ensure that you have the necessary dependencies configured as specified in the OpenClaw documentation. The skill leverages uv to manage its environment, so verify that your system is prepared to execute Python-based scripts within the baseDir structure.
Use Cases
This skill is indispensable for developers, researchers, and tech enthusiasts who want to stay informed efficiently. It is ideal for:
- Rapid Research: Quickly searching for discussions on specific technologies like "AI agents" or "LLM fine-tuning" to see what the community is saying.
- Trend Tracking: Using the
toporbestcommands to perform a quick morning briefing on industry developments. - Community Engagement: Browsing "Ask HN" or "Show HN" to discover new projects or crowd-source technical advice without being distracted by ads or social media clutter.
- Automation: Integrating Hacker News data into larger automation scripts or reporting pipelines.
Example Prompts
- "What are the top 10 stories on Hacker News right now?"
- "Search for the latest discussions on 'Claude' and limit the results to 5 stories."
- "Get the story details for ID 400123 and show the first 20 comments."
Tips & Limitations
- Rate Limiting: The skill uses the official API, which is highly reliable but follows standard API best practices. Avoid rapid-fire requests in tight loops to maintain performance.
- Performance: For deep dives into comment threads, start with the default settings and use the
--commentsflag only when necessary to reduce output volume. - Scope: This tool focuses on text-based reading. It does not provide voting capabilities or user profile management, keeping it focused on information retrieval and consumption.
Metadata
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Find the right skillPaste this into your clawhub.json to enable this plugin.
{
"plugins": {
"official-dbhurley-hn": {
"enabled": true,
"auto_update": true
}
}
}Tags(AI)
Flags: network-access, external-api, code-execution
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