HN Companion MCP Server

Prepares Hacker News discussions for summarization by language models like Claude.

Local serverstdio

What is the HN Companion MCP server?

HN Companion MCP server exists for a simple reason — assistants are far more useful when they can act on HN Companion directly instead of describing what you should do. Prepares Hacker News discussions for summarization by language models like Claude.

What you get

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) for summarizing Hacker News discussions using Claude.

This MCP fetches and processes Hacker News discussions, preparing them in a format that Claude can use to generate high-quality summaries. It handles both the hierarchical structure of comments and their metadata (scores, downvotes, etc.) to help Claude understand the relative importance and relationships of different comments.

  • Process Hacker News URLs or post IDs
  • Download and analyze comment structure from HN
  • Score comments based on community engagement
  • Format data optimized for Claude's summarization

Setting it up

The server ships on npm as @smithery/cli, so your MCP client can launch it on demand — there is no separate build step. Add the server block to your client's configuration, restart it, and the tools register themselves.

Before you rely on it

  • It runs with your machine's permissions. That is convenient and also the reason to think about what you point it at before you approve a tool call.
  • MCP clients confirm each tool call by default. Leave that on until you have watched what the hn companion mcp server does with a few real requests.

Choosing this one

This sits in the developer tooling group, where several servers overlap in what they claim to do but differ sharply once you actually set them up. It is maintained by georgeck; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

This entry was verified against HN Companion's own documentation before publication; SyncDev keeps the directory reviewed rather than auto-generated.

How to install the HN Companion MCP server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "hn-companion": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@smithery/cli"]
    }
  }
}

Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.

Frequently asked questions

HN Companion is a tool that prepares Hacker News discussions for summarization by language models like Claude. It fetches, processes, and formats HN comments, scores engagement, and provides prompts to optimize summarization results.