| name | hn-summarize |
| description | Fetch and summarize Hacker News / hckrnews.com top stories, articles, and their comment threads. Use when asked to summarize HN front-page stories, a specific HN story plus its discussion, or "the top N from hckrnews". |
HN Summarize
hckrnews.com is a JavaScript-rendered front end - curling it returns an empty shell, so do not scrape it. Instead use the official Hacker News APIs (Firebase + Algolia), which give the same stories with points, comment counts, and full comment trees. These APIs return plain JSON, so plain curl works fine.
1. Current top stories (the "top 10")
topstories.json returns 500 story IDs in front-page rank order. Take the first N and look up each item.
curl -sL 'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json' -o /tmp/top.json
python3 -c "
import json,urllib.request
ids=json.load(open('/tmp/top.json'))[:10]
for i,sid in enumerate(ids,1):
d=json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(f'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{sid}.json'))
print(f\"{i}. {d.get('title')} | {d.get('score')} pts | {d.get('descendants',0)} comments | id {sid}\")
print(f\" {d.get('url','(text post)')}\")
"
2. Find a specific story by topic (Algolia search)
curl -sL 'https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=YOUR+QUERY&tags=story' -o /tmp/s.json
python3 -c "
import json
for h in json.load(open('/tmp/s.json'))['hits'][:8]:
print(h['objectID'], '|', h.get('points'), 'pts |', h.get('num_comments'), 'comments |', h['title'])
print(' ', h.get('url'))
"
- Add
&numericFilters=created_at_i>UNIXTS to restrict to recent stories (avoids matching an old duplicate of the same headline).
search ranks by relevance; ranks by recency.
