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Summary
Read Hacker News (stories, comments, users, top/new/best/ask/show/job lists) from any AI agent via the official Firebase API. 8 tools, no auth.
Try asking
Example prompts for Hacker News
Click any prompt to copy it. Paste into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot or OpenClaw to run it against this connector.
Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
💡 No install? Use cloud.anythingmcp.com directly. Sign in, click Connectors → Hacker News, paste your credentials, mint an MCP API key — done. No Docker, no
git clone, no local server.
Hacker News
Read Hacker News (stories, comments, users, top/new/best/ask/show/job lists) from any AI agent via the official Firebase API. 8 tools, no auth.
Setup
This connector wraps the official Hacker News API hosted on Firebase (hacker-news.firebaseio.com).
Setup: nothing. The API is public, read-only, and unauthenticated.
No write access: the official API is READ-ONLY. There is no way to post stories, comments, or vote via this connector — those require a session cookie obtained by submitting an HTML login form to news.ycombinator.com, which is out of scope for an MCP adapter.
Two-step pattern: list endpoints return arrays of integer IDs only (e.g. top 500 story IDs). You must then fetch each ID via hackernews_get_item to get the actual title/url/text/score. Plan accordingly — fetching 500 top stories means 501 requests.
…(continued in the in-app connector instructions)
Prerequisites: (none — public API)
Install the connector locally
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HelpCode-ai/anythingmcp/main/docker-compose.quickstart.yml -o docker-compose.yml
printf 'JWT_SECRET=%s\nENCRYPTION_KEY=%s\n' "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" > .env
docker compose up -d
Open http://localhost:3000/connectors/store, pick Hacker News and paste in the env vars listed under Prerequisites.
Available tools
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
hackernews_top_stories | Returns an array of up to 500 item IDs for the current front-page (top) stories |
hackernews_new_stories | Returns an array of up to 500 newest story IDs |
hackernews_best_stories | Returns an array of up to 500 'best' story IDs (HN's algorithmic top) |
hackernews_ask_stories | Returns up to 200 Ask HN story IDs |
hackernews_show_stories | Returns up to 200 Show HN story IDs |
hackernews_job_stories | Returns up to 200 'Who is hiring / job' story IDs |
hackernews_get_item | Fetch a single item (story, comment, job, poll, pollopt) by ID |
hackernews_get_user | Fetch user profile by case-sensitive username: returns id, created, karma, about, submitted (array of recent item IDs) |
Next steps
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