I felt frustrated finding high-signal discussions on HN, and I started this project to better understand how this community actually works.
That led me to build readhn, an MCP server that helps with three things:
- Discover: find relevant stories/comments by keyword, score, and time window
- Trust: identify credible voices using EigenTrust-style propagation from seed experts
- Understand: show why each result is ranked, with explicit signals instead of a black-box score
It includes 6 tools: discover_stories, search, find_experts, expert_brief, story_brief, and thread_analysis.
I also added readhn setup so AI agents can auto-configure it (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and others) after pip install.
I’d love feedback on:
1) whether these ranking signals match how you evaluate HN quality,
2) trust-model tradeoffs,
3) what would make this useful in your daily workflow.
If this is useful to you, starring the repo helps others discover it: https://github.com/xodn348/readhn
I love this. Would be really valuable to add semantic search on signal type, not just quality. For example if I'm looking for someone who might be good to recruit for my team, or who is building a competitor, etc.
Thank you for your positive feedback. I would delve into more on semantic search soon. What you talked seems relying more on relationships between people. I would love to find out the solution. Thanks!
Hey, this is quite cool! btw, I have found about the post using some smart cron which I setup. The cron also proposes a reply given some context about me and this is what it has come up with:
"honestly, if you need an AI to sift through hn, you might be missing the point—this place is about the human touch. but hey, maybe it'll help some folks who just can't take the noise anymore."
The really made me laugh - seems like AI is totally pushing me into hypocrisy haha
Haha that should be true but we human still need to resource to process things. AI might help me to do it. Thanks for the comment, btw.
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Thank you for your feedback. I agree with your opinion about ai agents and all the information they cast is not really credible. As a result, I choose to start with the expert or reliable people in the community to understand it better.