Hacker News Agent

A Hacker News integration agent that fetches stories, extracts article content, analyzes comments, and provides content summaries through the official Hacker News API.

Tools

• fetch_hn_top_articles - Fetch top N stories with optional article content extraction
• fetch_hn_item_details - Get detailed information for a specific story or comment by ID
• summarize_hn_tldr - Generate TLDR summaries and sentiment analysis for stories
• slackbot_read_messages - Read messages from Slack channels
• slackbot_read_thread_replies - Read replies to Slack threads
• slackbot_read_message - Read a specific Slack message by timestamp
• slackbot_read_user_info - Get information about Slack users

Core Capabilities

Story and Content Access

• Hacker News Firebase API integration for real-time story data
• Article content extraction from external URLs with readability parsing
• Story metadata including scores, timestamps, authors, and comment counts
• Time-based formatting ("2h ago", "3d ago") for human-readable timestamps

Comment Analysis

• Hierarchical comment tree traversal with configurable depth limits
• Comment filtering with support for dead/deleted comment detection
• User attribution and parent-child relationship tracking
• Batch comment processing with concurrency controls

Content Processing

• HTML parsing and text extraction from article URLs
• Content summarization with TLDR generation
• Sentiment analysis based on community comments
• Configurable content limits and character truncation

Performance Features

• TTL-based caching system (2 minutes for top stories, 10 minutes for items)
• Concurrent request processing with configurable limits (default: 12)
• Automatic cache cleanup and memory management
• Timeout protections for external URL fetching

Platform Integration

• Native Slack integration with emoji reactions and threading
• Multi-platform support for Slack channels and web interfaces
• Real-time status updates during content processing

Use Cases

• Technology trend monitoring
• Competitive intelligence and market research
• Content curation for newsletters or reports
• Community sentiment analysis
• Developer ecosystem tracking
• Strategic planning based on technology discussions

Technical Details

• API: Official Hacker News Firebase API
• Caching: In-memory TTL cache with automatic cleanup (60s intervals)
• Concurrency: Configurable parallel processing (1-32 requests, default 12)
• Content Extraction: HTML parsing with readability-focused text extraction
• Timeouts: 8-second timeout for external URL fetching
• Error Handling: Graceful fallback for failed article extractions