hackernews-intel

hackernews-intel is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Varnan-Tech/opendirectory. It costs 102 tokens per session (1,476 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A keyword monitor for Hacker News, a website where developers share and discuss technology stories. It checks new posts and sends Slack alerts for unseen matches while remembering previously handled posts in a local database.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to track mentions of chosen topics, tools, or companies and notify a Slack channel when matching posts appear. It requires keywords and a Slack incoming-webhook URL.
Why use it?
It removes the need to repeatedly search Hacker News by hand and avoids alerting you about the same match twice. It can be run manually or on a schedule.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the opendirectory plugin — 58 skills shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/varnan-tech/opendirectory/hackernews-intel
Any agent
npx skills add Varnan-Tech/opendirectory --skill hackernews-intel
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Varnan-Tech/opendirectory

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install opendirectory, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 58 skills.

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-intel

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/varnan-tech/opendirectory/hackernews-intel.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/varnan-tech/opendirectory/hackernews-intel)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/varnan-tech/opendirectory/hackernews-intel"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/varnan-tech/opendirectory/hackernews-intel.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 102 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,476 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00102 $0.01476
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.00738
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00295
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00148

Measured 4d ago against content hash ea5257757255, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hackernews-intel 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/monitor-hn.js), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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-intel/SKILL.md · 157 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 157 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hacker News Intel

Monitor Hacker News for keywords. On each run, fetch new posts via the HN Algolia API, deduplicate against a local SQLite cache, and send Slack alerts for unseen matches. Run manually or schedule via cron or GitHub Actions.


Step 1: Check Setup

1a. Verify required environment variables

Check that these are set:

  • HN_KEYWORDS (required): comma-separated list of keywords to monitor
  • SLACK_WEBHOOK (required): Slack Incoming Webhook URL for alerts

If either is missing, stop and tell the user:

  • HN_KEYWORDS: list the topics you want to monitor, comma-separated. Example: claude code,LLM agents,deno runtime
  • SLACK_WEBHOOK: create an Incoming Webhook at https://api.slack.com/apps. Select your workspace, enable Incoming Webhooks, and copy the URL.

1b. Verify script dependencies

ls /Users/ksd/Desktop/Varnan_skills/hackernews-intel/node_modules/better-sqlite3 2>/dev/null

If missing:

cd /Users/ksd/Desktop/Varnan_skills/hackernews-intel && npm install

Step 2: Run the Monitor

cd /Users/ksd/Desktop/Varnan_skills/hackernews-intel && node scripts/monitor-hn.js

Flags:

  • --dry-run: print matches to stdout without sending any Slack alerts. Use this to preview what would be alerted before committing.
  • --days=N: on the first run, look back N days (default: 1). Only applies when the SQLite cache is empty.
  • --reset: clear the cache and start fresh. Use when you change your keyword list significantly.

What the script does:

  1. Reads HN_KEYWORDS from environment, splits by comma, trims whitespace
  2. Opens (or creates) a SQLite database at the path in HN_DB_PATH (default: ./hn-intel.db)
  3. For each keyword, calls https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date with numericFilters=created_at_i>lastSeen
  4. For each result, checks if the objectID is already in seen_posts — skips if yes
  5. If HN_MIN_POINTS is set, skips posts below that threshold
  6. For new matching posts, sends a Slack alert and inserts the objectID into the cache
  7. Updates poll_log with the run summary
  8. Prints a summary to stdout

Read the full file on GitHub · 157 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 4d ago First seen · 157 lines · 102 tokens per session scan A ea5257757255

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hackernews-intel is a skill published in the GitHub repository Varnan-Tech/opendirectory (635 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 102 tokens to every session and 1,476 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-30.

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