hn-companion

MCP for Hacker News Companion

javascript

0

GitHub Stars

javascript

Language

7 months ago

First Indexed

3 months ago

Catalog Refreshed

Documentation & install

Readme and setup notes from the catalogue, plus a client-ready config you can copy for your MCP host.

Installation

Add the following to your MCP client configuration file.

Configuration

View docs

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "georgeck-hn-companion-mcp": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": [
        "<full path to src>/hn-companion-mcp/server.js"
      ]
    }
  }
}

You can run the Hacker News Companion MCP to gather and structure Hacker News discussions so Claude can generate high-quality summaries. It preserves the comment hierarchy and metadata to help Claude understand importance and relationships, then delivers data in a format ready for summarization.

How to use

Launch the MCP server locally and connect your MCP client to it. The server processes a Hacker News post or URL, gathers the discussion, and returns a structured payload containing the post title, comment path mapping, and engagement data. You can then direct Claude to summarize the prepared data using the provided prompts.

How to install

Prerequisites: ensure you have Node.js installed on your system. You may also want npm (comes with Node.js) for package installation.

Option A — Installing via Smithery (automatic client install) This installs the MCP client for Claude with a single command.

npx -y @smithery/cli install @georgeck/hn-companion-mcp --client claude

Option B — Manual installation (clone and install dependencies) This is a straightforward setup you can run locally.

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/hn-companion-mcp.git
cd hn-companion-mcp
npm install

Additional configuration and usage notes

The MCP is designed to prepare Hacker News discussion data for Claude to summarize. After starting the server, you or your client can request a summary-ready payload by providing the post URL or post ID. The server returns a structured response that includes a system prompt, a user prompt, mappings for comment paths, the post title, the post ID, and a comment count.

Starting the server in typical local development involves running the runtime command described in the integration example to launch the MCP server process.

Available tools

Process Hacker News URLs

Fetches Hacker News posts or URLs and retrieves the full comment structure including metadata like scores and downvotes.

Analyze comment structure

Processes the hierarchical comment tree to capture relationships and engagement indicators for accurate summarization.

Score comments by engagement

Assigns scores to comments based on community engagement to help Claude understand relative importance.

Format Claude-ready data

Assembles the processed data into a structured payload with system prompts, user prompts, and mapping information tailored for Claude summarization.