The value is in the shape of the output: points, comment count and rank come back as numbers, so "what got traction today that mentions databases" is a filter rather than a reading exercise. Ask HN and Show HN are covered by the same tool as the front page, which is where most of the interesting discussion actually is.
A small MCP server that parses the HTML of news.ycombinator.com and hands back stories as objects instead of prose. One tool covers all five listings, so an assistant can read the front page the way a script would.
- Stories from any of the five listings — `top`, `new`, `ask`, `show` or `jobs`, defaulting to `top` — fetched by `get_stories`
- Each story as structured fields: `title`, `url`, `points`, `author`, `time`, `commentCount` and `rank`, so results can be filtered and sorted rather than read
- A count you choose, from 1 to 30, defaulting to 10
No account and no key — it reads the public site. The npm package name is `hn-server` (0.1.0); the documented path is a clone plus `npm install` and `npm run build`, then pointing your client at the built `index.js`. Because it parses HTML rather than calling an API, a redesign of the Hacker News front page is what would break it.
One command — npx -y github:pskill9/hn-server