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muneebhashonemuneebhashone/hn/SKILL.md

hn-search

Skill0 starsChanged 6 months agoMITView on GitHub

Use when researching what the tech/developer community thinks about a topic, validating SaaS or startup ideas against real discussion, surveying what's trending on Hacker News, digging into the full comment tree of an HN thread, mining recent Ask HN / Show HN / Jobs posts, or finding pain points and unmet needs in a niche. Apply when the user asks "what's trending in X", "is anyone shipping Y", "what are people complaining about regarding Z", "what does HN think of …", or links to a news.ycombinator.com URL.

1 other project uses a version of this.

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    1. dylanfeltus/skills★ 179same name

    How matches are found. Word for word: the exact same text. Edited: shares passages with this file (“99% same” means 99% of its five-word phrases also appear here; 10% or more counts). Their own version: similar meaning, or, weakest, the same name. We can’t tell which project had it first. Projects are counted among the 200 most-starred candidates, and mentions are links to the repository we found, up to 50 per site, so both counts are a floor.

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SKILL.md

hn-search

Two commands. Compact JSON by default; pass --pretty for a human-scannable view.

Invoke as hn … (after uv tool install . / pipx install .). For zero-install use uv run /path/to/hn.py … instead.

search [QUERY] — find stories or comments

FlagPurpose
[QUERY]Optional full-text query. Omit for pure tag/filter browsing.
--tag XRepeatable. Values: story, comment, ask_hn, show_hn, poll, job, front_page, author_<user>, story_<id>.
--sort relevance|dateDefault: relevance if query given else date.
--since / --untilTime bounds. 7d, 24h, 2w, 1y, or YYYY-MM-DD.
--min-points N / --min-comments NEngagement thresholds.
--limit N1–100, default 20.
--page N0-indexed.
--fields a,b,cTrim the hit object. Default already trims to the useful fields; pass all for the full Algolia payload.
--prettyHuman output.

Examples

# What's on the front page right now
hn search --tag front_page --limit 10

# Is "claude code plugin" a thing people are shipping? Last 30 days, ≥5 points
hn search "claude code plugin" --since 30d --min-points 5

# Pain points: recent Ask HN with real discussion
hn search --tag ask_hn --since 14d --min-comments 30

# What did this author post recently
hn search --tag author_dang --since 30d --limit 20

# Mine comments (not stories) mentioning a competitor
hn search "vercel" --tag comment --since 90d --limit 50

thread <ID_OR_URL> — fetch a full discussion

Accepts either a numeric item ID (e.g. 48243293) or any news.ycombinator.com/item?id=N URL. Returns the story with the complete nested comment tree in a single request (Algolia's /items/{id} pre-builds the tree — no N+1 fetching needed).

FlagPurpose
--depth NPrune past nesting depth N. --depth 1 = story + top-level only.
--max-comments NBFS cap on total comments returned. Useful for huge threads.
--top NKeep only the top-N branches by descendant count (the "biggest" conversations).
--min-score NDrop comments with points<N. HN hides comment scores so most are null — those are kept unless --strict.
--strictWith --min-score, also drop points: null comments.
--prettyIndented tree rendering.

Examples

# Just the story and top-level reactions
hn thread 48243293 --depth 1 --pretty

# Big thread, take the 3 most-discussed branches only
hn thread "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48242959" --top 3 --pretty

# Bounded sample for token budget
hn thread 48242959 --max-comments 50

Gotchas

  • Result cap. Algolia caps at ~1000 hits (nbPages × hitsPerPage). For long retrospectives, narrow with --since / --until rather than paginating deep.
  • Comment scores are mostly null. HN hides comment points, so most points fields on comments are null. --min-score keeps null-score comments unless you also pass --strict.
  • --tag front_page is "currently on the front page", not "ever was". For historical front-page stories, search with --min-points 100 --since 1y instead.
  • Use --sort date when freshness matters. Relevance sort buries new posts under older high-engagement ones.
  • Text is HTML-stripped by default. Pass --no-strip-html if you specifically need the raw markup.
  • Errors are structured. On failure: non-zero exit and a single-line JSON {"error":"...","status":N} on stderr (stdout stays clean for piping).

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