Hacker News

What it does

When your agent uses it

• Tasks that involve Social media marketing

Example prompts

• “did our launch land on HN,”
• “scan Show HN for,”
• “read this HN thread,”
• “/hacker-news”

Workflow steps

6 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

1. 1Frame the watch. Pick the feeds: show and ask for launches and
2. 2Scan a feed. Call hacker-news/stories/{feed}/items (hydrated items in
3. 3Read the thread. On a matching item, read score (points) and
4. 4Weight a critic. Call hacker-news/users/{id} for karma and
5. 5Watch for change. Call hacker-news/updates for recently changed items
6. 6Cite everything. Every figure ties back to the HN item it came from;

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit fb53247. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

• Tool permissions

  Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

  From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

• Runs code

  No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md (its code samples are json and markdown).

  From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

• Network

  No URLs in SKILL.md.

  From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

• Credentials

  Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

  From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Hacker News loads about 1.4k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 119 tokens; SKILL.md has 575 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it

~119

When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches

~1.4k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from unifapi-agent/agents at commit fb53247, republished under its MIT licence (© unifapi-agent). 575 words, ~1,440 tokens.

name

hacker-news

description

When a workflow needs public Hacker News data through UnifAPI — the top/new/best/ask/show/jobs story feeds, item metadata, comment trees, or user karma. Also use on "did our launch land on HN," "scan Show HN for," "read this HN thread," "Hacker News sentiment," or when another skill (launch monitor, social listening) needs the deterministic HN read path. No keyword search — scan the feeds. Connect via the `unifapi` skill first. Read-only research, never posts.

license

MIT

metadata.author

UnifAPI

metadata.version

1.0.0

metadata.homepage

https://unifapi.com/agents/hacker-news

metadata.source

https://github.com/unifapi-agent/agents

{
  "request_id": "unif_...",
  "data": {},
  "billing": { "records_charged": 1, "balance_remaining": 99 }
}

{
  "request_id": "unif_...",
  "data": [],
  "pagination": { "has_more": false, "next_cursor": null },
  "billing": { "records_charged": 1 }
}

**{Story title}** ({feed}) — {score} points, {descendants} comments. Landed: {yes/no}. Candid takes: "{quote}" (by {user}, {karma} karma). Evidence: {item URLs}. Records: ~{N}.

© unifapi-agent, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 1 other file in skills/hacker-news-agent/hacker-news of unifapi-agent/agents.

• SKILL.md
• README.md

Open the folder on GitHubat commit fb53247