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Hacker News Reader MCP Server

by Malayke
OverviewSchemaRelated ServersScoreDiscussions
Python
Remote
MIT License

Hacker News Reader MCP Server

Python 3.11+ License: MIT

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that fetches Hacker News discussions and article content. Optimized for LLM consumption with compact, token-efficient formatting.

Features

✅ Fetch complete Hacker News discussion threads
✅ Scrape linked article content in markdown format
✅ LLM-optimized output (compact nested replies)
✅ Accepts both HN URLs and item IDs
✅ Handles edge cases (text posts, Ask HN, deleted comments)
✅ Powered by Firecrawl for robust article extraction

Installation

Using uvx from GitHub (Recommended)

uvx --from git+https://github.com/Malayke/hackernews-mcp.git hackernews-mcp

Using uv pip

uv pip install git+https://github.com/Malayke/hackernews-mcp.git

Using pip

pip install git+https://github.com/Malayke/hackernews-mcp.git

Usage

As an MCP Server

Add to your MCP settings configuration (e.g., in Claude Desktop or other MCP clients):

{ "mcpServers": { "hackernews-mcp": { "command": "uvx", "args": [ "--from", "git+https://github.com/Malayke/hackernews-mcp.git", "hackernews-mcp" ], "env": { "FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "your_api_key_here" } } } }

Or if you've installed it with pip/uv pip:

{ "mcpServers": { "hackernews-mcp": { "command": "hackernews-mcp", "env": { "FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "your_api_key_here" } } } }

Environment Variables

Required:

Create a .env file:

FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

Available Tools

get_hn_content

Fetches Hacker News comments and the linked article content.

Input:

  • hn_url: HN URL or item ID

    • Full URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130187

    • Just ID: 46130187

Output: Combined markdown with:

  1. Article Content - Scraped article in markdown format

  2. HN Discussion - Formatted comment threads with metadata

Example:

{ "hn_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130187" }

Output Format

The tool returns LLM-optimized content:

# ARTICLE CONTENT [Article markdown content here...] --- # HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION STORY: Article Title URL: https://example.com/article AUTHOR: username | POINTS: 123 | TIME: 2 hours ago TOTAL_COMMENTS: 45 COMMENT #1 COMMENT [author @ time] ID: 123456 Comment text here... REPLY [author2 @ time] ID: 123457 Reply text here... REPLY [author3 @ time] ID: 123458 Nested reply text... COMMENT #2 ...

Development

Local Setup

# Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/Malayke/hackernews-mcp.git cd hackernews-mcp # Install dependencies with uv uv sync # Set up environment echo "FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your_api_key_here" > .env # Run the server uv run server.py

Testing

# Test the MCP server uv run python test_mcp_server.py

Using in Development Mode

For local development with live changes:

{ "mcpServers": { "hackernews-mcp": { "command": "uv", "args": [ "run", "--directory", "/path/to/hackernews-mcp", "python", "server.py" ], "env": { "FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "your_api_key_here" } } } }

Requirements

  • Python 3.11+

  • Firecrawl API key (for article scraping)

Dependencies

  • mcp - Model Context Protocol SDK

  • requests - HTTP requests

  • beautifulsoup4 - HTML parsing

  • firecrawl-py - Article content extraction

  • python-dotenv - Environment variable management

License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

Links

Support

For issues, questions, or contributions, please visit the GitHub repository.

This server cannot be installed

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security - not tested
A
license - permissive license
-
quality - not tested

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