Analyze Hacker News posts and their discussions to generate structured reports covering both linked content and community insights.
When to Use
Activate this skill when the user:
- Mentions "Hacker News", "HN", "Y Combinator news"
- Provides a news.ycombinator.com URL
- Asks about a HN discussion or comments
- Mentions "Show HN", "Ask HN", or "Launch HN"
- Wants to understand tech community sentiment on a topic
Instructions
- Parse the HN URL:
- Accept news.ycombinator.com/item?id=XXXXX format
- Extract item ID
- Fetch the HN post using WebFetch:
- Get post title, link, points, author
- Get top comments (aim for 20-30 top comments)
- If post links to content: Also fetch linked article
- If fetching fails:
- Inform user of issue
- Suggest checking URL format
- Stop here
- Read the analysis prompt from
prompts/hn.md - Extract metadata:
- Title, author, points
- Post type (Show HN, Ask HN, etc.)
- Comment count
- Generate analysis covering both content AND discussion
- Create output directory
reports/hackernews/if needed - Save the report to
reports/hackernews/YYYY-MM-DD_sanitized-title.md - Update the activity log at
logs/YYYY-MM-DD.md:- Add entry under "## HN Discussions" section
- Format:
- [Title](../reports/hackernews/filename.md) - HH:MM
- Confirm to user what was saved
Report Format
# [Post Title]
**Source**: [HN URL]
**Linked Content**: [Original URL if any]
**Points**: [Score]
**Comments**: [Count]
**Date**: YYYY-MM-DD
**Type**: Hacker News Discussion
---
[Analysis content following prompts/hn.md structure]
---
## My Notes
[Empty space for user notes]
Error Handling
- If URL format wrong: Suggest correct format
- If post deleted: Inform user
- If comments fail: Analyze post only
- If prompts/hn.md missing: Use prompts/default.md
Related
- Slash command:
/hn <url> - Prompt file:
prompts/hn.md - Output:
reports/hackernews/