Hacker News is a tech-focused news aggregator by Y Combinator, featuring user-submitted stories and discussions on startups, programming, and emerging trends
Hacker News is a tech-focused news aggregator by Y Combinator, featuring user-submitted stories and discussions on startups, programming, and emerging trends On Nagent, Hacker News is exposed as a fully-configurable news & lifestyle integration that any agent can call — 14 actions, and no authentication authentication. No code is required to wire Hacker News into your workflow — connect it once via the External Integrations panel and reuse it across every agent you build.
Agent builders use Hacker News to automate the kinds of tasks news & lifestyle teams previously handled manually. Concrete examples — each one is a single agent step in Nagent — include:
Every action and trigger is paired with a structured input/output schema (visible in the sections below), so when you wire Hacker News into Helix — our agentic agent builder — the editor knows exactly what each step expects and produces. Configure once, deploy anywhere across your Nagent agents.
Every operation an agent can call against Hacker News, with input parameters and output schema. Drop these into any step of an agent built in Helix.
HACKERNEWS_GET_ASK_STORIESGet up to 200 latest Ask HN story IDs from Hacker News. Returns an array of item IDs for Ask HN posts in ranked order.
Input parameters
Output format for JSON response.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_BEST_STORIESGet up to 500 best story IDs from HackerNews ranked by score. Returns story IDs only. Use the returned IDs with get_item_with_id action to fetch full story details.
Input parameters
Output formatting options for the API response.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_ITEMTool to get a Hacker News item by its unique ID from the Firebase API. Use when you need to retrieve details about a specific story, comment, job, poll, or pollopt.
Input parameters
The unique integer ID of the item (story, comment, job, poll, or pollopt) to retrieve from Hacker News.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_ITEM_WITH_IDGet a specific item from Hacker News using its ID. Limits response size to prevent context overflow.
Input parameters
The unique numeric ID of the Hacker News item (story, comment, job, poll, or pollopt). Can be obtained from other HN API endpoints like search or front page.
Maximum depth of nested comment replies to include. 0 means no children, 1 means direct replies only, 2 means replies to replies, etc. Default is 2.
Maximum number of direct child comments to include in the response. Higher values return more comments but increase response size. Default is 10.
Whether to truncate long text content (comments, story text) to 500 characters. Set to False to get full text. Default is True to prevent context overflow.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_JOB_STORIESGet up to 200 latest job story IDs from Hacker News. Returns an array of item IDs for job postings that can be used to fetch full job details.
Input parameters
Set to 'pretty' for formatted JSON output. If not specified, returns compact JSON.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_LATEST_POSTSGet the latest posts from Hacker News based on optional filters. Results can be limited using the size parameter.
Input parameters
Page number for pagination (0-indexed). Default is 0.
Maximum number of results to return. Default is 5. Set to 0 or None to return all results from the page (up to 20 per page).
Tags to filter posts. Multiple tags are ANDed. Available tags: story, comment, poll, pollopt, show_hn, ask_hn, front_page, author_<USERNAME>, story_<ID>. Example: \['story'\] for stories only, \['comment', 'story_12345'\] for comments on story 12345.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_MAX_ITEM_IDTool to get the current largest item ID from Hacker News. Use when you need to discover the most recent items or iterate through all items in the system by walking backward from this ID.
Input parameters
Set to 'pretty' for formatted JSON output. Leave unset for compact JSON.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_NEW_STORIESGet up to 500 newest story IDs from Hacker News. Returns an array of item IDs sorted by recency (most recent first). Use these IDs with the Get Item action to retrieve full story details.
Input parameters
Set to 'pretty' for formatted JSON output. Leave empty for compact JSON.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_SHOW_STORIESTool to retrieve up to 200 latest Show HN story IDs from Hacker News. Use when you need to find recent Show HN posts where people share their projects, products, or creations.
Input parameters
Set to 'pretty' for formatted JSON output. Leave empty for compact JSON.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_TOP_STORIESGet up to 500 top story IDs from HackerNews including jobs. Returns story IDs sorted by front page position. Use the returned IDs with get_item_with_id action to fetch full story details.
Input parameters
Output formatting options for the API response.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_UPDATESGet recently changed items and user profiles from Hacker News. Use this to monitor recent activity or updates on the platform.
Input parameters
Set to 'pretty' for formatted JSON output. Leave unset for compact output.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_USERRetrieve a Hacker News user's public profile by their username. Returns the user's username, karma score, and optional bio/about text. Use this to look up information about HN community members.
Input parameters
The case-sensitive username of the Hacker News user to retrieve (e.g., 'pg', 'dang').
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_GET_USER_BY_USERNAMETool to get a user profile by their case-sensitive username from the HackerNews Firebase API. Use when you need detailed user information including creation date, karma, bio, and submission history. Only users with public activity are available.
Input parameters
The case-sensitive username of the Hacker News user to retrieve. Only users with public activity (comments or story submissions) are available.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
HACKERNEWS_SEARCH_POSTSSearch Hacker News posts using full-text search powered by Algolia. Use this action to find stories, comments, and discussions on Hacker News matching specific keywords. Supports filtering by post type (story, comment, show_hn, ask_hn) and by author.
Input parameters
Page number for pagination (0-indexed).
Maximum number of results to return. Default is 5. Set to None or 0 to return all results from the page (up to 20).
Filter by tag type. Use comma-separated tags for AND logic. Available tags: story, comment, poll, pollopt, show_hn, ask_hn, front_page, author_<USERNAME> (e.g., author_pg), story_<ID> (e.g., story_123456).
Full-text search query. Supports AND, OR, NOT operators.
Output
Data from the action execution
Error if any occurred during the execution of the action
Whether or not the action execution was successful or not
No publicly available marketplace agent is found using this tool yet. There are 49 agents privately built on Nagent that already use Hacker News.
Build on Nagent
Connect Hacker News to any Nagent agent in minutes — no API key management, no boilerplate. Just configure and deploy.
The five questions agent builders ask before adopting a new integration.
Open the External Integrations panel inside Nagent (app.nagent.ai/externalIntegration), find Hacker News, and click "Connect Now." You'll authenticate with no authentication (it’s public) — Nagent handles credential storage and refresh automatically. Once connected, Hacker News is available to any agent in your workspace.
No. Nagent provides no-code integration for every tool. Once Hacker News is connected, you configure its 14 actions directly in the agent builder UI — no API calls, no boilerplate, no schema management.
Helix — Nagent's agentic agent builder — lets you drop Hacker News steps into any workflow visually. Pick an action (e.g., one of those listed above), fill in the inputs (Helix knows the required vs. optional schema for each parameter), and connect it to upstream/downstream steps. Triggers run as the entry point of an agent, so when a Hacker News event fires, the agent kicks off automatically.
Every Hacker News action and trigger ships with a fully-typed schema — input parameters with name, type, required flag, and description, plus the output payload shape. The schemas are documented in the sections above. Helix uses these schemas to validate your configuration at build time and to type-check the data flowing between steps.
Yes. While Hacker News ships with 14 pre-built news & lifestyle actions, you can layer custom logic around them inside Helix — pre/post-processing steps, conditional branches, retries, or stitching Hacker News together with other connected tools. For deeper customization, talk to our team about Nagent's Agentic AI Lab — forward-deployed engineers who build Hacker News-based workflows tailored to your business.