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hackernews-frontpage

Scrape Hacker News front page stories into a JSON document.

2|Updated May 8, 2026
Search Tags:#automation#json#web-scraping#scrape#hacker-news#hn#top-stories
One-click install
npx skills add https://github.com/xotong/claude-marketplace --skill hackernews-frontpage-xotong
Or copy as Structured Prompt for Agent▼
Please help me install this Agent Skill.
Skill: hackernews-frontpage
Source: https://github.com/xotong/claude-marketplace/tree/main/plugins/gstack/skills/browser-skills-hackernews
Command: npx skills add https://github.com/xotong/claude-marketplace --skill hackernews-frontpage-xotong

SYSTEM DOCUMENTATION & REQUIREMENTS

What problem does it solve?

Scrapes the Hacker News front page to produce a structured listing of the top stories.

Core Features & Use Cases

  • Retrieve rank, title, URL, points, and comments for each story from the Hacker News front page.
  • Emit a single JSON document suitable for dashboards, monitoring, or downstream processing.
  • Use in automated monitoring to surface trending tech stories in real time.

Quick Start

Run the hackernews-frontpage skill to fetch the top stories from Hacker News.

Frequently Asked Questions about hackernews-frontpage

High-intent search queries and answers about installing and using this skill.

FAQPage Schema
How do I scrape Hacker News top stories into JSON format?▼

To scrape Hacker News top stories into JSON, this skill parses the front page HTML structure and extracts rank, title, URL, points, and comments for each story, emitting a single structured JSON document.

What data fields are available when scraping the Hacker News front page?▼

Scraping the Hacker News front page retrieves rank, title, URL, points, and comments for each top story. It parses the stable HTML table rows to extract these specific data fields into a JSON payload.

Can I automate web scraping of Hacker News for real-time monitoring dashboards?▼

Yes, you can automate web scraping of Hacker News for monitoring dashboards. The skill uses a deterministic browser-based fetch to produce a JSON document suitable for automated trending tech story surfacing.

Does this Hacker News scraper require any external dependencies or API keys?▼

This Hacker News scraper requires no external dependencies or API keys. It performs a deterministic browser-based fetch directly on news.ycombinator.com and parses the stable HTML structure without needing libraries.

What is the best way to get structured Hacker News data without using the official API?▼

The best way to get structured Hacker News data without the API is web scraping the front page. This approach parses the stable HTML table rows to retrieve rank, title, URL, points, and comments into JSON.

How does the scraper handle changes to the Hacker News HTML structure?▼

The scraper targets the stable tr.athing HTML structure on the Hacker News front page to parse stories. It relies on this deterministic structure to reliably extract data fields into a JSON document.

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