A powerful CLI-driven interface to browse, search, and extract data from Hacker News without authentication.
Install & Download
1. ClawHub CLI
The fastest way to install a skill directly from the registry.
npx clawhub@latest install hackernews
2. Manual Installation
Copy the skill folder to one of these locations
~/.openclaw/skills/ <project>/skills/ Priority: Workspace > Local > Bundled
3. Prompt Installation
Copy this prompt to OpenClaw to install it automatically.
Help me install hackernews using Clawhub. If Clawhub is not installed, install it first (npm i -g clawhub).
Prefer to download?
Get the raw skill files in a ZIP archive.
What is Hacker News?
The Hacker News skill provides a robust gateway for AI agents and developers to interact with the Hacker News ecosystem. It allows for seamless browsing of top, new, and best stories, as well as specialized sections like Ask HN, Show HN, and job postings. By integrating this into Openclaw Skills, users can automate research, monitor tech trends, and analyze community discussions directly through a programmatic interface.
This skill simplifies data retrieval by handling the complexity of parallel API requests and converting messy HTML comments into clean, readable plain text. Whether you need to find the latest AI breakthroughs or track specific user profiles, this tool provides the necessary infrastructure to treat Hacker News as a structured data source.
Hacker News Use Cases
- Monitoring trending tech topics and new product launches via Show HN.
- Researching specific technologies or historical discussions using Algolia-powered search.
- Tracking job opportunities and recruitment trends through automated "Who is hiring?" thread analysis.
- Analyzing community sentiment by fetching and processing deep comment threads on specific stories.
How Hacker News Works
- The user or agent invokes the skill via the
scripts/hn.shscript with a specific command liketop,search, orcomments. - The skill executes parallelized HTTP requests to the Hacker News Firebase API or the Algolia Search API depending on the query.
- Fetched data is processed to convert HTML entities into plain text and transform Unix timestamps into relative time formats (e.g., "2h ago").
- For story lists, the tool fetches item details in parallel to ensure high-performance output.
- The final data is outputted as human-readable text or structured JSON if the
--jsonflag is provided.
Hacker News Setup
No authentication or API keys are required to use this skill. Ensure the script has execution permissions and run it from your terminal within the Openclaw Skills environment.
# Give execution permissions
chmod +x scripts/hn.sh
# Test the installation by fetching top stories
scripts/hn.sh top --limit 5
Hacker News Data Schema & Taxonomy
The skill organizes Hacker News data into several logical structures. All outputs can be toggled to JSON for automated processing.
| Object Type | Key Fields | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Item | id, title, text, type, score, by, time | Represents a story, comment, or job |
| User | id, karma, created, about | Profile details and user bio |
| Comment | id, text, by, parent, kids | Nested discussion data with depth control |
| Search Result | hits, nbHits, page | Paginated results from Algolia search |
Hacker News Advanced Features
- Parallel fetching: Utilizes concurrent requests to speed up the retrieval of story lists and item details.
- JSON Output: Every command supports a
--jsonflag, making it compatible with downstream data pipelines and other Openclaw Skills. - Deep Threading: The
commentscommand supports--depthand--limitparameters to control the granularity of discussion retrieval. - Advanced Search: Supports filtering by type (story/comment), sort order (date/popularity), and time periods (day/week/month/year).
SKILL.md
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