MCP server
by erithwik
Integrate with Hacker News to track ai trends, analyze artificial intelligence trends, and engage with top tech stories
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Share your MCP server with the developer community
Hacker News reduced integration guesswork — categories and install configs on the listing matched the upstream repo.
Hacker News has been reliable for tool-calling workflows; the MCP profile page is a good permalink for internal docs.
I recommend Hacker News for teams standardizing on MCP; the explainx.ai page compares cleanly with sibling servers.
Hacker News is a well-scoped MCP server in the explainx.ai directory — install snippets and categories matched our Claude Code setup.
According to our notes, Hacker News benefits from clear Model Context Protocol framing — fewer ambiguous “AI plugin” claims.
According to our notes, Hacker News benefits from clear Model Context Protocol framing — fewer ambiguous “AI plugin” claims.
We wired Hacker News into a staging workspace; the listing’s GitHub and npm pointers saved time versus hunting across READMEs.
Hacker News has been reliable for tool-calling workflows; the MCP profile page is a good permalink for internal docs.
We evaluated Hacker News against two servers with overlapping tools; this profile had the clearer scope statement.
Useful MCP listing: Hacker News is the kind of server we cite when onboarding engineers to host + tool permissions.
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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>
get_stories Fetching (top, new, ask_hn, show_hn) storiesget_story_info Fetching comments associated with a storysearch_stories Searching for stories by queryget_user_info Fetching user infoUse 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
To install Hacker News MCP Server for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:
npx -y @smithery/cli install mcp-hn --client claude
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"]
}
}
}
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
Prerequisites
Time Estimate
20-40 minutes including configuration and testing
Steps
Troubleshooting
✓ Do
✗ Don't
💡 Pro Tips
Architecture
MCP server handles HTTP requests, HTML parsing, JavaScript rendering (if headless browser), and returns structured data to Claude.
Protocols
Compatibility
✓ 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.