Fetch the top N Hacker News stories with titles, URLs, scores, and comment counts.

Provided free and as is, without warranty of any kind — including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and the accuracy or completeness of any result. See the licence. You are responsible for checking what this produces before relying on it.

Hacker News Top

Fetch the top N stories from Hacker News with titles, URLs, scores, and comment counts. Uses the official HN Firebase API. Free, no auth.

Tool ID

hacker-news-top

Credential Required

No.

Input Properties

Property	Type	Default	Description
`count`	string	`"10"`	Number of stories to fetch. Clamped to 1-50.

Published Outputs

Output	Description
`summary`	Multi-line text summary, ready to email or Slack
`stories`	JSON array of `{rank, id, title, url, score, by, comments, hnLink}`
`count`	Number of stories returned
`timestamp`	ISO 8601 timestamp

Example

Input:

{
  "tool": "hacker-news-top",
  "properties": {
    "count": "5"
  }
}

Actual captured output:

Hacker News top 5 — 2026-04-21 13:57
  1. The Vercel breach: OAuth attack exposes risk in platform environment variables (30 pts, 9 comments, 0.7h ago)
     https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/26/d/vercel-breach-oauth-supply-chain.html
  2. Laws of Software Engineering (595 pts, 304 comments, 6.9h ago)
     https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com
  3. A Periodic Map of Cheese (24 pts, 1 comments, 1.4h ago)
     https://cheesemap.netlify.app/
  4. Show HN: GoModel – an open-source AI gateway in Go (94 pts, 29 comments, 3.8h ago)
     https://github.com/ENTERPILOT/GOModel/
  5. Fusion Power Plant Simulator (80 pts, 27 comments, 3.5h ago)
     https://www.fusionenergybase.com/fusion-power-plant-simulator

How it works

The HN API requires two steps: fetch the ID list, then fetch each story's details. This tool parallelizes the per-story fetches (up to 10 concurrent) so 10 stories completes in ~1-2 seconds total.

Chaining Patterns

hacker-news-top → email — daily morning tech digest
hacker-news-top → ai → slack — summarize trending topics, post to team
hacker-news-top → dataframe — filter by score threshold
Part of daily-brief composite jobs

Limitations

Only "top" stories. For "new" or "best" or "ask HN" etc., a separate endpoint call would be needed.
No comment contents — just count.
Stories without URLs (Ask HN, Show HN text posts) get the HN-link URL as the url field.

Publishes

The keys a later task may reference as {{taskName.key}}. Referencing anything not listed here resolves to nothing at run time.

count
error
stories
summary
timestamp

Input Properties

Every property this tool accepts, from its own tool.iml.

Property	Type	Required	Default	Description
`count`	string	no	`10`	Number of stories to fetch (1-50)