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.

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

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

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security – no known vulnerabilities

license - permissive license

quality - confirmed to work

remote-capable server

The server can be hosted and run remotely because it primarily relies on remote services or has no dependency on the local environment.

Fetches and processes Hacker News discussions to prepare them for Claude to generate high-quality summaries, handling comment structure and metadata to help Claude understand the relative importance of different comments.

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