robomotionio Hacker News Scraper
Search Hacker News via the public Algolia HN API — keyless, free. Returns discussions ranked by points so a GTM/marketing agent can monitor tech-community sentiment, discover launches, and catch competitive signals.
When to use
- You need HN discussions on a topic, product, or competitor.
- Tracking mentions of a tool/brand in the tech community.
- Discovering
Show HN/Ask HNlaunches in a recent window. - Recurring sentiment monitoring (store ids between runs to report only new threads).
How to run
The capability is the bundled script scripts/hn_search.py (Python 3 stdlib only —
no install). Run it through the terminal tool:
python3 ${SKILL_DIR}/scripts/hn_search.py --query "<terms>" [options]
Options:
| Flag | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
--query |
"" |
Search terms. May be empty when --tags drives the search. |
--days |
7 |
How many days back to search (server-side date filter). |
--tags |
story |
Item type: story, comment, ask_hn, show_hn. |
--max-results |
50 |
Cap on returned items. |
--keywords |
"" |
Comma-separated OR filter applied client-side to title+text. |
--output |
json |
json (array) or summary (human-readable lines). |
Examples
# Topic search, last 30 days, ranked JSON
python3 ${SKILL_DIR}/scripts/hn_search.py --query "robomotion" --days 30
# Launch discovery — recent Show HN posts (empty query, tag-driven)
python3 ${SKILL_DIR}/scripts/hn_search.py --tags show_hn --days 7 --max-results 30 --output summary
# Competitor mention sweep with extra keyword filter
python3 ${SKILL_DIR}/scripts/hn_search.py --query "rpa" --keywords "uipath,automation anywhere,blue prism" --output summary
Output
JSON array sorted by points desc; each item:
{id, title, url, author, points, num_comments, created_at, hn_url, text}.
Recurring / monitoring mode
For a recurring monitor, persist returned ids between runs and surface only new
ones (dedup). If SUPABASE_URL / SUPABASE_KEY are set, upsert there keyed on id
with a first-seen timestamp; otherwise keep the id list in the agent's workspace for
single-session dedup. The script itself is stateless — orchestrate dedup around it.
Credentials / env
- Required: none — the Algolia HN API is fully public and keyless (no paid service).
- Optional (if-set/else):
SUPABASE_URL/SUPABASE_KEY— if set → Supabase cross-run history/dedup; else → the agent's workspace id list (the default; the script is stateless).
Notes & limits
- The Algolia HN API is free with no hard rate limit "within reason"; the script spaces paginated calls and backs off on HTTP 429.
- Date filtering is server-side (
numericFilters=created_at_i>cutoff) — don't re-filter by date afterward. --tagsand--queryare AND-combined server-side. Empty--query+--tags show_hnis the launch-discovery mode.- Algolia applies typo tolerance / prefix matching, so very short queries (≤3 chars)
match loosely. Prefer the
--keywordsOR-filter to tighten brand/competitor sweeps.