hacker-news

name: hacker-news description: Scrape Hacker News front page stories including titles, URLs, scores, authors, and comment counts from news.ycombinator.com. Use when the user mentions Hacker News, HN, ycombinator, or wants tech news stories. metadata: author: scrapeagent version: "1.0"

Hacker News Scraper

Overview

Scrapes the Hacker News front page at https://news.ycombinator.com No JavaScript required — use the fetch tool.

Instructions

1. Fetch https://news.ycombinator.com using the fetch tool

2. The page has 30 story items. Each story spans two <tr> elements:

   • Row 1 (.athing): title and link
   • Row 2 (.subtext): metadata (score, author, comments)

3. For each story extract:

   • rank: .rank text, strip the trailing .
   • title: .titleline > a text (first <a> inside .titleline)
   • url: .titleline > a href — if starts with item?id=, prepend https://news.ycombinator.com/
   • domain: .sitebit .sitestr text (may be empty for HN-internal posts)
   • score: .score text, extract the number (e.g., "342 points" → 342)
   • author: .hnuser text
   • age: .age a text (e.g., "3 hours ago")
   • comments: last <a> in .subtext — extract the number, or 0 if "discuss"

4. Save with columns: rank, title, url, domain, score, author, age, comments

Notes

• HN does not require JS — fetch works fine
• "Ask HN" and "Show HN" posts have internal HN URLs (item?id=...)
• Job posts may have no score/author/comments — handle gracefully with None/empty values
• To scrape a specific page: https://news.ycombinator.com/?p=2 (page 2), etc.