Hacker News Companion MCP

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) for summarizing Hacker News discussions using Claude.

Overview

This MCP fetches and processes Hacker News discussions, preparing them in a format that Claude can use to generate high-quality summaries. It handles both the hierarchical structure of comments and their metadata (scores, downvotes, etc.) to help Claude understand the relative importance and relationships of different comments.

Related MCP server: Hacker News MCP Server

Features

• Process Hacker News URLs or post IDs

• Download and analyze comment structure from HN

• Score comments based on community engagement

• Format data optimized for Claude's summarization

Installation

Installing via Smithery

To install Hacker News Companion for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:

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

Manual Installation

1. Clone the repository:

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

2. Install dependencies:

   npm install

Usage

CLI

node index.js <post-id-or-url>

Example:

node index.js 43448075
# or
node index.js https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448075

API Server

Start the server:

npm start

Make a request:

curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/api/summarize \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"input": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448075"}'

API Reference

POST /api/summarize

Request body:

{
  "input": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448075"
}

Response:

{
  "status": "success",
  "data": {
    "systemPrompt": "...",
    "userPrompt": "...",
    "commentPathIdMapping": { ... },
    "postTitle": "...",
    "postId": "...",
    "commentCount": 123
  }
}

Integration with Claude

This MCP is designed to prepare data for Claude to summarize. When a user asks Claude to summarize a Hacker News discussion, Claude can call this MCP to get the formatted data and then generate a summary based on the provided system and user prompts.

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

License

MIT