hackernews

hackernews is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Riddhimaan-Senapati/unofficial-HackerNews-MCP-CLI. It costs 159 tokens per session (1,309 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A read-only command-line and MCP client for Hacker News, a website where people share and discuss technology stories. It can query stories, comments, users, and other Hacker News data through the site's public API.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to browse top, newest, best, Ask HN, Show HN, and job stories, or to inspect specific stories, comments, and user profiles.
Why use it?
It lets tools retrieve Hacker News content without opening the website manually or setting up authentication. JSON output is available for scripts and other software to parse.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Good fit Use it to browse top, newest, best, Ask HN, Show HN, and job stories, or to inspect specific stories, comments, and user profiles.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/riddhimaan-senapati/unofficial-hackernews-mcp-cli/hackernews
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Riddhimaan-Senapati/unofficial-HackerNews-MCP-CLI --skill hackernews
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Riddhimaan-Senapati/unofficial-HackerNews-MCP-CLI

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for hackernews

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/riddhimaan-senapati/unofficial-hackernews-mcp-cli/hackernews/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/riddhimaan-senapati/unofficial-hackernews-mcp-cli/hackernews)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/riddhimaan-senapati/unofficial-hackernews-mcp-cli/hackernews"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/riddhimaan-senapati/unofficial-hackernews-mcp-cli/hackernews/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for hackernews

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/riddhimaan-senapati/unofficial-hackernews-mcp-cli/hackernews"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/riddhimaan-senapati/unofficial-hackernews-mcp-cli/hackernews.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 159 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,309 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00159 $0.01309
Opus 5 $0.00079 $0.00655
Sonnet 5 $0.00032 $0.00262
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00131

Measured 5d ago against content hash 83356e032e46, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hackernews scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/hackernews/SKILL.md · 160 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 160 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

HackerNews CLI & MCP

A read-only client for the official HackerNews API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API). It ships two entry points over one shared async client, so both behave the same way:

  • hn, a Typer CLI with Rich tables, for terminal use.
  • hn-mcp, a FastMCP server exposing the same operations as MCP tools, for MCP clients like Claude Desktop.

The API needs no authentication and has no rate limit. Timestamps are Unix epoch seconds. The title, text, and about fields contain HTML.

Setup

From the project root (uses uv):

uv sync

Then run either uv run hn ... (no install) or install the console scripts with uv pip install -e . and call hn or hn-mcp directly.

CLI usage

Every command takes --json to emit raw JSON instead of a table. Use it when you need to parse the output.

Story lists

hn stories top                 # front-page (top) stories, 30 by default
hn stories top --limit 10      # or -n 10
hn stories new                 # newest stories
hn stories best                # best recent stories
hn stories ask                 # latest Ask HN posts
hn stories show                # latest Show HN posts
hn stories job                 # latest job postings

The top, new, and best lists draw from up to 500 stories. The ask, show, and job lists draw from up to 200. A --limit over the category's cap exits non-zero with a suggestion.

A single item

hn item 8863           # story, comment, job, or poll by id

A comment thread

hn comments 8863               # top-level comments + one level of replies
hn comments 8863 --depth 2     # nest replies 2 levels deep (-d)
hn comments 8863 --limit 50    # up to 50 comments per level (-n)

--depth 0 shows only top-level comments (no replies expanded). Depth is capped at 5, and limit is capped at 100 per level. These caps bound the number of API calls.

A user

hn user pg             # profile: karma, account age, submission count, about

Read the full file on GitHub · 160 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago Changed · +6 lines · +4 tokens per session 83356e032e46
  2. 9d ago First seen · 154 lines · 155 tokens per session scan A aa91b81a6d0e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hackernews is a skill published in the GitHub repository Riddhimaan-Senapati/unofficial-HackerNews-MCP-CLI (0 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 159 tokens to every session and 1,309 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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