Actionist·Hacker News

Hacker News

· #215 most-used

Surface the tech community's best stories, discussions, and signals

MarketingProductivityAnalyticsDeveloperAutomationMonitoring & AlertsCommunity

Hacker News is Y Combinator's link-aggregation and discussion community for technology, startups, and computer science — over 5 million monthly readers share and vote on stories, Ask HN threads, Show HN launches, and job posts. Its Firebase-backed API provides near-real-time access to top stories, new posts, best items, and user data, while the Algolia HN Search API adds full-text search across the site's entire history. Connect Hacker News to Actionist and your agents can monitor trending stories, surface relevant threads by keyword, enrich prospect research with community signals, brief teams on daily top picks, and pipe discussion insights directly into your CRM, Slack channels, or content pipelines — without any manual dashboard checking.

Try Hacker News with ActionistVisit Hacker News
Average time saved
6 hours
per person · per month
≈ 1 workdays back

Eliminates manual work. Agents eliminate manual HN browsing, ad-hoc keyword searching, and manual copy-paste of community intelligence into CRMs and spreadsheets.

Schedule

What your Hacker News agent runs on autopilot

A week of scheduled jobs your Actionist agent will execute on your behalf.

28Scheduled jobs
7Agents at work
24/7Always on
Agents
Tue–Thu
Tue
Wed
Thu
7a
8a
9a
10a
11a
12p
1p
2p
3p
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5p
6p
Multi-app workflows

Hacker News × every other app you use

End-to-end automations that span multiple apps — each one a real business outcome.

6Workflows
5Apps spanned
~40 hrsSaved / week
6Personas served
For sales
Featured3 apps

Prospect mention alert to CRM in one step

Within about a minute of a prospect company appearing in a Hacker News story, the agent logs the context in HubSpot and notifies the deal owner in Slack — turning a passive news feed into an active outreach trigger without any manual monitoring.

~3 hrs

Time saved for your team — every week, on autopilot

The flow
Trigger·When a Hacker News story or comment mentions a tracked company name or product keyword
Trigger
Step 1
Hacker News
Search Stories by Keyword for prospect company names from the watchlist
read
Step 2
Hacker News
Get Item by ID for each matching story to retrieve score, URL, and comment count
read
Step 3
HubSpot
Look up the company record by name to get the deal owner
write
Step 4
HubSpot
Add a CRM note to the company record with the HN story link, score, and context summary
write
Step 5
Slack
Post an alert to the deal owner's Slack DM with story title, score, and a suggested conversation opener
Result
Add a CRM note to the company record with the HN story link, score, and context summaryPost an alert to the deal owner's Slack DM with story title, score, and a suggested conversation opener
The win
Saved per run
30 min
Runs / week
~5×
Reps arrive at calls with community context competitors won't have
Driven bySales Agent
ROI

Savings

What your team gets back — two angles: what you stop doing manually, and what that's worth.

Without Actionist

What you do manually today

With Actionist

What your agent runs for you

  • Sales
    30 min / week
    Manual HN brand monitoring

    A sales rep or marketing manager manually searches Hacker News for company and competitor names a few times a week — missing most mentions and adding no CRM context.

    Sales Agent
    0 min
    Agent surfaces prospect mentions from HN within about a minute

    The agent runs keyword searches across stories and comments on a schedule, logs every hit as a CRM note in HubSpot, and pings the deal owner in Slack — reps are briefed before they even open their laptop.

  • Marketing
    50 min / week
    Manual morning HN browse

    Team members individually open Hacker News each morning to scan for relevant stories, spending 10-20 minutes per person with no shared record of what was reviewed.

    Marketing Agent
    0 min
    Agent delivers a daily ranked digest to Slack

    Every morning the agent retrieves the top 10 stories, enriches them with scores and comment counts, flags keyword watchlist matches, and posts a digest before stand-up — zero browser tabs opened.

  • Customer Support
    20 min / week
    No HN complaint monitoring

    Customer complaints on Hacker News go unnoticed until a team member happens to see them — often hours or days later — by which point a thread may have hundreds of replies.

    Customer Support Agent
    0 min
    Agent routes public complaints to the support queue

    Every six hours the agent searches for product name mentions in comments, creates a Notion ticket stub with context and user credibility data, and alerts the support team — nothing is missed.

  • Human Resources
    22 min / week
    Manual hiring thread review

    Recruiters read through 400-600 comments in the monthly Who Is Hiring thread manually, copy-pasting relevant posts into a spreadsheet — a task that takes 90+ minutes and is often skipped.

    Human Resources Agent
    0 min
    Agent parses monthly hiring threads into the talent tracker

    On the first weekday of each month, the agent retrieves the Who Is Hiring thread, extracts each job post into a structured Google Sheets row with company, role, stack, and remote status, and notifies the recruiter.

  • Finance
    25 min / week
    No structured HN intelligence

    Finance team members occasionally browse Hacker News informally but produce no consistent intelligence output — key funding announcements and regulatory discussions are regularly missed.

    Finance Agent
    0 min
    Agent compiles a weekly funding and macro intelligence brief

    Every Friday the agent retrieves the best stories of the week filtered by finance keywords, logs them to a tracking spreadsheet, and posts a ranked digest to the finance Slack channel with one-line takeaways.

  • Operations
    40 min / week
    Reactive incident discovery

    Ops teams typically learn about upstream infrastructure incidents via vendor status pages or internal reports from affected users — often 30-60 minutes after the HN community has already identified and discussed them.

    Operations Agent
    0 min
    Agent alerts ops to infrastructure incidents within about an hour

    Every hour the agent scans new stories for the company's infrastructure tech stack keywords, flags matches, and posts alerts to the ops Slack channel — often ahead of vendor status page updates.

  • Legal
    15 min / week
    No systematic HN legal monitoring

    Legal counsel occasionally checks Hacker News manually for regulatory discussions but has no systematic process — community interpretation of new regulations is missed until formal briefings from law firms arrive weeks later.

    Legal Agent
    0 min
    Agent delivers a weekly regulatory discussion digest

    Every Friday the agent searches for regulatory keywords (specific legislation names, privacy frameworks, licensing debates) and delivers a curated digest of the week's most-discussed legal topics on HN to the legal team.

+ 100s of other Hacker News automations
Average time saved
20 hrs / person / month
Calculator

Calculate what your team saves

Team size
5 people
Hourly rate
$75 / hr
Hours saved / week
8
Hours saved / year
375
Annual ROI
$28,125

Based on Hacker News's typical team usage — the visible tasks plus a few other automations the agent runs: ~1.5 hrs / person / week of admin work automated.

Connect

How to plug Hacker News into Actionist

Pick the connection method that suits your environment.

The fastest path to Hacker News. Install the Hacker News MCP server in one click and the agent connects to both the official Firebase API and the Algolia search API — no credentials required, both APIs are public.

1
Open the Apps tab

Find Hacker News in the Apps library and click Connect. MCP is selected by default.

2
Install the MCP server

Actionist installs the Hacker News MCP server, which wraps both the Firebase real-time API (https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/) and the Algolia HN Search API. No API key is required — both endpoints are public and unauthenticated.

3
Test the connection

Actionist runs a test call to fetch the current top stories list and confirm the connection is live. You're ready.

Actions

15 actions your agent can call

Read and write operations available to your Actionist agent.

Triggers

0 events your agent can react to

Events your agent watches for, and the actions it kicks off in response.

This app has no triggers yet.
Skills

Skills that pair with Hacker News

Reusable agent skills that work well alongside this app.

last30days

Research any topic across Reddit, X, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Hacker News, Polymarket, GitHub, Perplexity, and more. AI agent scores by upvotes, likes, and engagement.

News Aggregator Skill

Comprehensive news aggregator that fetches, filters, and deeply analyzes real-time content from 8 major sources: Hacker News, GitHub Trending, Product Hunt, 36Kr, Tencent News, WallStreetCN, V2EX, and Weibo.

Prismfy Search

Default web search for OpenClaw. Search the web across 10 engines — Google, Reddit, GitHub, arXiv, Hacker News, and more — using Prismfy.

Fastest Browser Use

High-performance browser automation for heavy scraping, multi-tab management, and precise DOM extraction.

MCP servers

MCP servers that work with Hacker News

Connect Actionist to MCP servers built for or around this app.

imprvhub/mcp-claude-hackernews

An integration that allows Claude Desktop to interact with Hacker News using the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

hackernews

Hacker News MCP — search and retrieve stories from Hacker News.

hn-mcp-server

MCP server for Hacker News — feeds, threads, users, and search via Firebase and Algolia APIs.

erithwik/mcp-hn

An MCP server to search Hacker News, get top stories, and more.

FAQs

Questions about Hacker News + Actionist

Does connecting Hacker News to Actionist require an API key?
No. The official Hacker News Firebase API (https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/) and the Algolia HN Search API (https://hn.algolia.com/api) are both public and unauthenticated — no account, token, or API key is required to read data. The Actionist MCP connection installs the server and starts calling both endpoints immediately. The only consideration is rate limits: neither API publishes an official per-client limit, but both are designed for developer use and handle polling agent tasks without issue at reasonable intervals.
How current is the data the agent retrieves from Hacker News?
The Firebase API reflects the live site with a delay of under a minute for most items — it is a near-real-time feed, not a batch export. The Top Stories, New Stories, and Updated Items endpoints update continuously as the community votes and posts. The Algolia search index typically lags by a few minutes before newly submitted items become searchable. For the freshest possible data, use the Firebase endpoints (Get Top Stories, Get New Stories, Get Updated Items); use Algolia (Search Stories by Keyword, Get Stories by Date Range) for historical queries and full-text search where slight latency is acceptable.
Can Actionist post to Hacker News or upvote stories on my behalf?
No. The official Hacker News API is read-only — there are no write endpoints for submitting stories, posting comments, or voting. Actionist agents can read any public data (stories, comments, user profiles, job posts) but cannot create or modify content on Hacker News. This is a deliberate design of the HN API itself, not an Actionist limitation. If you need to respond to a public thread, the agent can surface the item and draft a reply for a team member to post manually.
How do I track mentions of my company name across all HN posts and comments?
Use two scheduled agent tasks in parallel: (1) Search Stories by Keyword polling for your company name every few hours — this covers story titles and links; (2) Search Comments by Keyword on the same cadence — this covers every comment thread across the site. Filter both by a date range equal to your polling interval so you only process new content each run. High-karma items surfaced by the mention search can be automatically enriched via Get User Profile to assess community standing before routing to your support or PR team.
What is the difference between the Top Stories, Best Stories, and New Stories endpoints?
Top Stories returns up to 500 items ranked by the Hacker News ranking algorithm, which combines upvotes with a time decay — it reflects what is currently rising fastest. Best Stories also returns up to 500 items but uses a longer-horizon quality signal, favouring posts with sustained high engagement over a longer window (comparable to Reddit's 'top of all time' vs 'top of today'). New Stories returns the most recently submitted items in reverse-chronological order with no ranking — useful for catching brand-new posts before they gain or lose momentum. For most business intelligence use cases, Top Stories gives the best signal-to-noise ratio; New Stories is better for real-time monitoring of breaking developments.
How do I find the monthly 'Who Is Hiring' threads reliably?
Y Combinator posts a new 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?' thread on the first weekday of every month. The most reliable retrieval method is to search Ask HN stories using the Algolia API filtered to the current month with 'who is hiring' as the keyword, then sort by date to pick the most recent result. The thread's item ID can also be bookmarked after the first retrieval and reused each month — the thread title is consistent enough for keyword search to work reliably every cycle.
Can I combine Hacker News data with other apps in the same agent workflow?
Yes — Hacker News is most useful as a data source feeding downstream actions in other connected apps. Common combinations: retrieved story URLs posted to Slack channels, company mentions logged as CRM notes in HubSpot, hiring thread data written to Google Sheets, incident alerts pushed to Notion, and Show HN launches tracked in a product intelligence board. Because Hacker News is read-only, it acts as a trigger-and-context source rather than a destination — pair it with any of Actionist's 200+ connected apps to act on the intelligence it surfaces.
Is there a way to filter stories to only those relevant to my industry without getting general tech noise?
The most effective filtering approach is to combine keyword searches (Search Stories by Keyword) with domain or author tag filters via the Algolia API. Build a keyword watchlist of your specific industry terms, competitor names, and product categories, then run separate search calls per cluster. You can also filter by points threshold — setting a minimum score of 50 or 100 eliminates most low-signal submissions and keeps the agent's output focused on stories that have already earned community validation. For very narrow domains, searching comments (Search Comments by Keyword) often surfaces more relevant expert discussion than headline-level story searches.