Hacker News

14 tools available

Hacker News is a tech-focused news aggregator by Y Combinator, featuring user-submitted stories and discussions on startups, programming, and emerging trends

news & lifestyle

Connect Hacker News Visit Hacker News ↗

Connect Hacker News to Definable to automate repetitive tasks, sync data with the rest of your stack, trigger on real-world events. Personas call Hacker News's 14 tools directly from chat or scheduled flows. You can wire it into any persona to read, write, and react when an event fires.

Common workflows with Hacker News

Trigger on event

Listen for a new event
Parse and validate the payload
Take an action with the linked tool

Daily summary

Pull yesterday's activity
Summarise with the model of your choice
Send the digest via email or Slack

Cross-tool sync

Read records from one app
Transform with a persona
Write the result back via this integration

Hacker News actions 14

Every Hacker News action below is a callable tool any Definable persona can invoke.

Get Ask HN Story IDs

Get up to 200 latest Ask HN story IDs from Hacker News. Returns an array of item IDs for Ask HN posts in ranked order.

Get Best HackerNews Stories

Get up to 500 best story IDs from HackerNews ranked by score. Returns story IDs only. Use the returned IDs with get_item_with_id action to fetch full story details.

Get Hacker News Item

Tool to get a Hacker News item by its unique ID from the Firebase API. Use when you need to retrieve details about a specific story, comment, job, poll, or pollopt.

Get Hackernews Item

Get a specific item from Hacker News using its ID. Limits response size to prevent context overflow.

Get Job Story IDs

Get up to 200 latest job story IDs from Hacker News. Returns an array of item IDs for job postings that can be used to fetch full job details.

Get Latest Hackernews Posts

Get the latest posts from Hacker News based on optional filters. Results can be limited using the size parameter.

Get Max Item ID

Tool to get the current largest item ID from Hacker News. Use when you need to discover the most recent items or iterate through all items in the system by walking backward from this ID.

Get New Hacker News Stories

Get up to 500 newest story IDs from Hacker News. Returns an array of item IDs sorted by recency (most recent first). Use these IDs with the Get Item action to retrieve full story details.

Get Show HN Stories

Tool to retrieve up to 200 latest Show HN story IDs from Hacker News. Use when you need to find recent Show HN posts where people share their projects, products, or creations.

Get Top HackerNews Stories

Get up to 500 top story IDs from HackerNews including jobs. Returns story IDs sorted by front page position. Use the returned IDs with get_item_with_id action to fetch full story details.

Get Hacker News Updates

Get recently changed items and user profiles from Hacker News. Use this to monitor recent activity or updates on the platform.

Get Hacker News User

Retrieve a Hacker News user's public profile by their username. Returns the user's username, karma score, and optional bio/about text. Use this to look up information about HN community members.

Get HackerNews User by Username

Tool to get a user profile by their case-sensitive username from the HackerNews Firebase API. Use when you need detailed user information including creation date, karma, bio, and submission history. Only users with public activity are available.

Search Hackernews Posts

Search Hacker News posts using full-text search powered by Algolia. Use this action to find stories, comments, and discussions on Hacker News matching specific keywords. Supports filtering by post type (story, comment, show_hn, ask_hn) and by author.

Frequently asked questions

What can I automate with Hacker News on Definable?

Anything Hacker News exposes through its API. Common news & lifestyle workflows on Definable include automate repetitive tasks, sync data with the rest of your stack, trigger on real-world events. Personas can call any of the 14 Hacker News tools directly, then chain the result into another integration without you writing code.

How does Hacker News authentication work?

Hacker News doesn't require authentication on Definable — it's a public-data integration, so personas can call it immediately without an account hand-off.

Is the Hacker News integration included in my Definable plan?

Yes — every Definable plan, including Starter, includes access to all 14 Hacker News tools. You only need a separate Hacker News subscription if Hacker News itself charges per seat or per API call.

Is using Hacker News through Definable secure?

Every call from a persona to Hacker News is logged with the user, persona, prompt, and response. Tokens never leave Definable's secrets vault, scopes are configurable per persona, and you can revoke access at any time from the integration page.

How do I get started with Hacker News on Definable?

Sign up for Definable, open the integrations page, find Hacker News, and connect in one click — no auth required. You can immediately attach Hacker News to any persona and start running workflows. The free Starter plan includes 5,000 credits/month.

What Hacker News actions does Definable expose?

Definable exposes all 14 Hacker News actions as callable tools — including `Get Ask HN Story IDs`, `Get Best HackerNews Stories`, `Get Hacker News Item`, plus 11 more. Each tool gets a typed parameter schema so personas know exactly how to call it.

Ready to automate with Hacker News?

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