hacker-news

Hacker News tools for DeepSeek Harness: browse the ranked feeds, read a thread with its reply tree, search the Algolia index, and look up a user.

The plugin is published as dsh-hacker-news and listed in the .

Plain ESM JavaScript, no build step and no runtime dependency on the hn binary — it talks to the public HN APIs directly (https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0 and https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1).

Tools

Tool	Arguments	Returns
hn_stories	feed (top/new/best/ask/show/job), limit, offset	Ranked stories with id, score, comment count, URLs
hn_item	id (required), comment_limit, max_depth	The item plus its reply tree in reading order, with depth and truncated
hn_search	query (required), sort (relevance/date), tags, limit	Algolia hits normalised to the story shape
hn_user	id (required)	found, karma, account age, bio, submission count

Comment HTML is converted to plain text (links keep their label plus target) and clipped at maxTextLength. Reply loading is breadth-first, so a small comment_limit returns the top of the thread rather than one deep branch; truncated reports whether anything was left out.

Use

Ask naturally; the plugin guides the agent to the matching tool:

What's popular on Hacker News right now?
Search Hacker News for SQLite WASM.
Read HN item 49322107 and summarize the discussion.
Look up the HN user dang.

Install

Install the published package:

dsh plugin --profile <name> add -w dsh-hacker-news

Restart DSH Web after installation. If your npm mirror has not indexed the latest release, use the public npm registry for the install:

$env:npm_config_registry = 'https://registry.npmjs.org/'
dsh plugin --profile <name> add -w dsh-hacker-news

The package ships runnable JavaScript, so no prepare build and no pnpm allowBuilds entry is needed. To install directly from the repository or from a local checkout:

dsh plugin --profile <name> add -w github:heartleo/hn-cli#path:/plugins/hacker-news
dsh plugin --profile <name> add -w /absolute/path/to/hn-cli/plugins/hacker-news
dsh --profile <name> --dump-config   # shows the "# == dsh-hacker-news" layer

To load it from source without installing, point a patch overlay at the entry file:

- insert:
    - id: hacker-news
      name: '/absolute/path/to/hn-cli/plugins/hacker-news/index.js'

pnpm dsh web --patch ./scratch/hacker-news.cordis.yml

Configuration

Every tunable is a config field, overridable per profile in cordis.patch.yml:

- id: hacker-news
  name: dsh-hacker-news
  config:
    defaultStoryLimit: 30
    defaultCommentLimit: 100
    requestTimeoutMs: 20000

Field	Default	Meaning
firebaseBaseUrl	https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0	Official HN API root
algoliaBaseUrl	https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1	Search API root
requestTimeoutMs	15000	Per-request timeout
concurrency	20	Maximum in-flight item fetches
defaultStoryLimit / maxStoryLimit	20 / 100	Story and search result counts
defaultCommentLimit / maxCommentLimit	50 / 400	Replies loaded per hn_item call
defaultCommentDepth / maxCommentDepth	5 / 10	Reply nesting followed
maxTextLength	2000	Clip length for story, comment, and bio text
userAgent	dsh-hacker-news/0.1.0 …	Sent on every request

Checking it locally

npm test first runs the offline routing and presentation tests, then load-check.mjs registers the tools against a stub context, runs every tool against the live API, validates each result with the registry's own output-schema validator, and exercises the rejection paths:

cd plugins/hacker-news
npm install --no-package-lock
npm test

The final integration phase needs network access.