hn-daily_skill

Overview

This skill fetches and filters top Hacker News stories to produce concise daily digests or automated feeds. It supports keyword filtering for topics like AI, programming, and startups, and uses a local cache to reduce rate usage and speed up repeated requests. The tool can output plain text or JSON for integration with other workflows.

How this skill works

It polls Hacker News top story IDs, fetches story details, and applies configurable filters such as minimum score and keyword matching. Results are cached (default 4 hours) to avoid repeated network calls; a --no-cache option forces a fresh fetch. Output can be formatted as compact text for human reading or as JSON objects for programmatic use.

When to use it

• Get a short daily tech digest from Hacker News
• Monitor specific topics (AI, programming, startups) with keyword filters
• Automate HN fetching in scripts or cron jobs
• Integrate HN top stories into dashboards or chatbots
• Produce JSON output for downstream processing

Best practices

• Set strict keyword lists to reduce noise and focus on relevant stories
• Use --min-score to exclude low-engagement items
• Enable caching for regular automated runs to minimize API usage and latency
• Use --format json for integrations, and text format for human-friendly digests
• Configure HTTP_PROXY/HTTPS_PROXY if operating behind a corporate proxy

Example use cases

• Run hourly cron job to append top AI stories to a team Slack channel
• Fetch top 5 high-scoring programming posts for a daily developer newsletter
• Power an internal dashboard that highlights startup and GitHub-related HN posts
• Generate a JSON feed consumed by a personal homepage or aggregator
• Temporarily bypass cache (--no-cache) when you need the latest trending stories