The deterministic guide to reading public Hacker News data through UnifAPI — story feeds, items, comment trees, and users.
The Hacker News Data Skill is the source-sliced data guide a Platform Agent owns: it names the concrete hacker-news/... operations, response shapes, and gotchas for reading HN's public feeds through UnifAPI MCP, so any launch-reception or social-listening research for dev/infra/startup categories runs from one deterministic workflow. Read-only — it never posts.
A source-sliced data skill you run inside Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes, or any MCP client — the deterministic, read-only path to one platform's public data. It names the operations and response shapes; the marketing skills in the same agent turn those records into briefs, prices, and signals. Eyes not hands — it never posts.
- Any HN-first research that needs story feeds, items, or comment trees
- Skills that read launch reception or candid technical sentiment
- Operators who want one deterministic HN read path, not ad-hoc discovery
- The concrete
hacker-news/...operations for each common feed/thread read job - Response-contract and shape notes for items, feeds, and users
- Deterministic recipes: scan feeds, match a launch, read the comment tree
- Platform gotchas (kids are comment ids, descendants/score fields, no search)
Live public data through the shared unifapi data skill — UnifAPI APIs: hacker-news. Connect once over OAuth; no scraping to maintain and no keys to rotate. Every figure in the output is cited to the record it came from.
Using the Hacker News Data Skill, check how our launch is landing: scan the top, show, and ask feeds for matching stories, then read the comment tree (kids) on any matching item for points, volume, and candid critique. Return a cited brief. Read-only.
Run it in any MCP client. Paste one prompt (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, …) to add the UnifAPI public-data MCP server at https://mcp.unifapi.com over OAuth — read-only, no API key — then add the marketing skills with npx skills add unifapi-agent/agents.
Prefer a web connector (Claude · ChatGPT · Perplexity · Grok), or the one-shot plugin for Claude-compatible hosts:
/plugin marketplace add unifapi-agent/agents
/plugin install unifapi@unifapi
Every client, step by step: https://unifapi.com/mcp
- Part of the Hacker News Agent
- Shared data skill:
unifapi
- Skill page: https://unifapi.com/skills/hacker-news
- The skill itself: SKILL.md
- Install & all clients: https://unifapi.com/mcp
- Docs: https://docs.unifapi.com
Topics: Hacker News research tool · Hacker News monitoring · Hacker News data · Show HN tracking · Hacker News comment analysis · track launch reception on HN · Hacker News MCP server