hacker-news — DeepSeek Harness plugin
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 awesome-dsh-plugin community registry.
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-newsRestart 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-newsThe 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" layerTo 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.ymlConfiguration
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 testThe final integration phase needs network access.