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.
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Ask Hacker anything
Try a real prompt against Hacker News via AnythingMCP — Claude calls the tools, returns the answer. Press Enter on your own message to install on Cloud.
Install Hacker on CloudClaude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
Setup in 2 minutes
- 1Start a free trial on cloud.anythingmcp.com.
- 2Click Hacker News in the connector store. Paste credentials when prompted.
- 3Mint an MCP API key and point your AI client at the generated MCP URL.
Guides for Hacker
Step-by-step setup for the most popular AI clients.
Setting up Hacker News
From the connector definition itself: where to find the credentials, what they need to be allowed to do, and which API this adapter talks to.
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.
Item types: story, comment, job, poll, pollopt. Each has different fields — comments have parent + text, stories have title + url (or text for Ask HN), jobs have title + url + text.
Comment trees: comments are a tree via kids (array of IDs) on each item. Walk recursively, watch for deleted: true or dead: true entries.
Rate limits: no published limit, but Firebase will throttle aggressive clients. Stay under ~30 req/s and you'll be fine.
Cache friendly: every item is content-addressable by ID and immutable once posted (votes update but story body doesn't). Long TTLs work well.
Out of scope here: HN Algolia full-text search (different API at hn.algolia.com — could be a separate adapter), write/vote, email subscription.
Your AI is two clicks away from Hacker News.
Install the connector, paste your credentials, ask your AI a question. 7-day free trial, no credit card.