Hacker News

Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com). Use this skill for ANY Hacker News request — searching and reading data. Whenever a task involves Hacker News, use this skill instead of calling the API directly.

Operate Hacker News through your OOMOL-connected account. This skill calls the hackernews connector with the oo CLI; OOMOL injects credentials server-side, so you never handle raw tokens.

Running an action

Hacker News needs no account connection. Assume the oo CLI is installed and signed in. Do not run oo auth login proactively — just run the action. Fall back to First-time setup only when a command actually fails.

1. Inspect the contract to get the authoritative input/output schema before building a payload:

bash

oo connector schema "hackernews" --action "<action_name>"

2. Run the action with a JSON payload that matches the input schema:

bash

oo connector run "hackernews" --action "<action_name>" --data '<json>' --json

• --data takes a JSON object string or @path/to/file.json; omit it to send {}.
• The response is { "data": ..., "meta": { "executionId": "..." } }; the execution id lives under meta.executionId.

Each action is listed below with a one-line description; actions that change state carry a [write] or [destructive] tag. Before constructing --data, fetch the action's live schema with oo connector schema to get its authoritative input fields.

Available actions

• get_ask_stories — Get the latest Ask HN story IDs from Hacker News.
• get_best_stories — Get the best story IDs from Hacker News ranked by score.
• get_item — Get a Hacker News item by its numeric ID.
• get_item_with_id — Get a Hacker News item with a bounded nested comment tree.
• get_job_stories — Get the latest job story IDs from Hacker News.
• get_latest_posts — Get the latest Hacker News posts via Algolia search_by_date.
• get_max_item_id — Get the current largest Hacker News item ID.
• get_new_stories — Get the newest story IDs from Hacker News.
• get_show_stories — Get the latest Show HN story IDs from Hacker News.
• get_top_stories — Get the top story IDs from Hacker News sorted by front page position.
• get_updates — Get recently changed items and user profiles from Hacker News.
• get_user — Get a Hacker News user's public profile summary by username.
• get_user_by_username — Get a Hacker News user's detailed public profile by username.
• search_posts — Search Hacker News posts using Algolia full-text search.

Safety

• Untagged actions are reads (get / list / search) — safe to run directly.
• Actions tagged [write] change Hacker News state — confirm the exact payload and effect with the user before running.
• Actions tagged [destructive] remove or overwrite data — always confirm the target and get explicit approval first.

First-time setup

These are one-time steps — do not repeat them on every call. Run a step only when a command fails for the matching reason.

• oo: command not found — install the oo CLI (other platforms: https://cli.oomol.com/install-guide.md):

  bash

  curl -fsSL https://cli.oomol.com/install.sh | bash    # macOS / Linux
  

  powershell

  irm https://cli.oomol.com/install.ps1 | iex           # Windows PowerShell
  

• Not signed in / authentication error — sign in to your OOMOL account once:

  bash

  oo auth login
  

• HTTP 402 / OOMOL_INSUFFICIENT_CREDIT — billing stop. Recharge at https://console.oomol.com/billing/token-recharge before retrying.

Resources

• Hacker News homepage: https://news.ycombinator.com