Hacker News
Analytics & DataRead-only access to Hacker News through its Firebase and Algolia APIs: fetch items and users, pull story-list feeds, hydrate front-page stories, and run full-text search. No credentials required.
What This Integration Enables
The Hacker News connector lets agents read Hacker News inside a workflow. Agents fetch individual items and users, pull the top, new, best, Ask, Show, and job story-list feeds, and hydrate the front page in a single call. The Algolia actions run full-text search by keyword, author, or content type, search by date with numeric filters over points and comment counts, and fetch a story with its entire nested comment thread at once. Because everything is read-only and unauthenticated, the connector is pure signal in; the surrounding flow decides what to summarize, log, or escalate.
Without FlowRunner
With FlowRunner
Use Case Scenarios
Front-Page Digest
On a schedule the agent calls Get Top Stories (Hydrated) to pull the current front page as full items, then posts the highest-scoring headlines with links to a team channel. The hydrated action returns the first N items in one call, so the digest is one request rather than a story-list of ids followed by dozens of lookups.
Keyword Monitoring
The agent watches for mentions of a product, company, or topic. Using Search by Date with a `created_at_i` numeric filter, it collects every new story matching the keyword, reads points and comment counts, and logs each hit to a monitoring sheet. Stories that clear the relevance and score threshold get flagged for a person; the rest are recorded for the trend.
Trending Thread Summary
When a discussion about the team's space starts trending, the agent calls Get Item (Algolia) to fetch the full nested comment tree in one call, then hands the thread to a summarization step. The summary lands in a community channel so the team follows the conversation without each person reading hundreds of comments.
Human-in-Loop Highlight
Reading Hacker News is safe. Acting on what you read, replying in public, posting a competitor's news externally, kicking off outreach, carries reputation risk the agent should not absorb alone. The connector is read-only, so the agent gathers signal freely, but the moment a story would drive an external action, it stops. When a monitored keyword surfaces a story that clears the threshold, the agent assembles the title, score, thread summary, and a proposed next step, then routes to the owner through their channel: "A post about our category is on the front page with 300 points and an active thread. I drafted a note for the community channel. Post it, or hold?" This is [human-in-the-loop](/concepts/human-in-the-loop/) at the boundary between listening and speaking: the agent handles the reading and the summarizing, and a person owns what the organization says in public.
Agent Capabilities
15 actionsItems & Users
3- Get Item Fetch a single Hacker News item (story, comment, job, poll, or poll option) by numeric id.
- Get User Fetch a Hacker News user profile including karma and submission history.
- Get Max Item ID Return the current largest item id on Hacker News.
Story Lists
8- Get Top Stories Return the list of ids for the current top stories.
- Get New Stories Return the list of ids for the newest stories.
- Get Best Stories Return the list of ids for the best stories.
- Get Ask Stories Return the list of ids for the Ask HN feed.
- Get Show Stories Return the list of ids for the Show HN feed.
- Get Job Stories Return the list of ids for the jobs feed.
- Get Updates Return the change feed of recently updated items and profiles.
- Get Top Stories (Hydrated) Fetch the first N top stories as full items in a single call.
Search
4- Search Run a full-text Algolia search by keyword, author, or content type.
- Search by Date Run an Algolia search sorted by date with numeric filters over points, comments, or timestamp.
- Get Item (Algolia) Fetch a story with its entire nested comment thread in one call.
- Get User (Algolia) Fetch a hydrated user record from the Algolia API.
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