hackernews-mcp

A small, read-only Model Context Protocol server that gives Claude Desktop and Claude Code first-class access to Hacker News. It speaks MCP over stdio and talks to two public, no-auth APIs:

• Official HN (Firebase) — https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/ — feeds, items, and users.
• Algolia HN Search — https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/ — full-text search.

No API keys, no accounts, nothing is mutated. Every tool is marked read-only.

Tools

Tool	When to reach for it
get_stories	Browse a ranked feed. Returns a compact list (id, title, author, score, comment count, url, hn_url) with no comment trees — ideal for scanning the front page or a section. Params: category (top/new/best/ask/show/job, default top), limit (default 30, max 100).
get_item	Go deep on one thread. Returns the item plus a nested comment tree walked breadth-first. The tree is hard-capped by max_comments (default 50) and max_depth (default 3) so it never blows up your context; a truncation_note tells you when replies were cut. Dead/deleted comments are skipped. Params: id (required), include_comments (default true), max_depth (default 3), max_comments (default 50).
get_user	Look up a profile by username (case-sensitive). Returns karma, the about text, account creation date, and submitted-item count. Param: id (required).
search	Full-text search across all of HN via Algolia. Params: query (required), sort (relevance default, or date), tags (e.g. story, comment, ask_hn, show_hn, front_page), min_points (int), limit (default 20, max 100). Returns hits with title, author, points, comment count, date, story URL, and hn_url.

Two conventions across all tools: every Unix timestamp is returned both raw (time) and as an ISO 8601 UTC string (time_iso), and every item carries a derived hn_url (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=<id>).

Quick rule of thumb: get_stories/search to find things, get_item to read one thing in depth.

Build

Requires a recent stable Rust toolchain (edition 2021).

git clone https://github.com/devrelopers/hackernews-mcp
cd hackernews-mcp
cargo build --release

The binary lands at target/release/hackernews-mcp.

Install in Claude Desktop

Add an entry to your claude_desktop_config.json:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "hackernews": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/hackernews-mcp/target/release/hackernews-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Use the absolute path to the binary you just built (e.g. /Users/you/hackernews-mcp/target/release/hackernews-mcp). Restart Claude Desktop; the four tools will appear under the 🔌 tools menu.

Install in Claude Code

claude mcp add hackernews -- /absolute/path/to/hackernews-mcp/target/release/hackernews-mcp

Notes

• Item fetches in get_stories and get_item run concurrently with a politeness cap of ~10 in-flight requests.
• Logs are written to stderr so they never corrupt the JSON-RPC stream on stdout. Set RUST_LOG=debug for verbose tracing.
• Missing items/users return an actionable error (Item <id> not found — it may be deleted or the ID may be invalid.) rather than a panic.

Layout

src/
  main.rs     # tokio entrypoint + stdio transport wiring
  client.rs   # shared reqwest client over the Firebase + Algolia APIs
  tools.rs    # the four MCP tools + breadth-first comment-tree walker
  types.rs    # data models and compact output shapes

License

MIT — see LICENSE.