Connect OpenClaw to Hacker News
Let an OpenClaw agent track, search and summarize Hacker News stories, comments and users, with no credentials handed to the agent.
Hacker News is the link-and-discussion site run by Y Combinator, and for a large part of the software industry it is where new tools, launches, outages and arguments surface first. Founders watch it for competitor launches, developer-relations teams watch it for mentions of their product, and engineers read it to keep up. The reading is the problem: the front page turns over several times a day, the interesting part is often buried in a 300-comment thread, and searching for “did anyone discuss our library” means opening a dozen tabs.
With Claworc’s External Connections, an OpenClaw agent can read
Hacker News on your behalf. You add the connection once through the instance settings,
Composio holds the connection, and the agent gets an auto-generated claworc-hackernews
skill that tells it which Hacker News tools exist and how to call them. The agent never
sees a password, an OAuth token or an API key.
Tools available to OpenClaw agents
Section titled “Tools available to OpenClaw agents”Composio’s Hacker News toolkit exposes 14 read-only tools. In practice an OpenClaw agent leans on a handful of capabilities:
- Read the front page — fetch up to 500 stories in front-page order, which is the starting point for any “what is on HN right now” request.
- Read a story or thread — fetch one story or comment along with its replies, with control over how deep and how many to include, so the agent can read a thread without pulling all of it.
- Search posts — full-text search across posts, filtered by type and author, for finding every mention of a product or topic.
- Follow Show HN and Ask HN — the latest Show HN launches and Ask HN questions.
- List job postings — the latest job stories.
- Watch the newest posts — recent posts with optional filters, for a rolling feed rather than a ranked one.
- Look up a user — a user’s public profile, including karma and bio.
Every action goes through a small broker running next to the agent, so the agent only needs to describe what it wants done in plain language and let the skill handle the rest.
Use cases
Section titled “Use cases”A front-page briefing
Section titled “A front-page briefing”“Give me the top ten stories right now with a one-line summary of each and the gist of the comments.” The agent lists the front page, reads each story and the top of its thread, and returns a briefing you can read in two minutes. Schedule it for 8am and you are caught up before standup.
Watch for mentions
Section titled “Watch for mentions”Ask the agent to search for your product name, your company and your main competitors every few hours and tell you only when something new appears. When a thread about you starts, you find out from the agent rather than from a customer.
Track Show HN launches in your space
Section titled “Track Show HN launches in your space”“Which Show HN posts this week are developer tools for observability?” The agent pulls the latest Show HN stories, reads the descriptions, filters to your category and returns the list with links, points and comment counts, so competitive research takes a message instead of an afternoon.
Get started
Section titled “Get started”Connecting Hacker News takes three steps: an admin adds a Composio API key to Claworc’s
settings, you open the instance’s Settings tab, click + Add connection and pick
Hacker News. The Hacker News API is public, so there is no account to sign in to. The
claworc-hackernews skill appears in the instance a moment later. The full walkthrough,
including the exact Composio permissions the key needs, is in the
External Connections documentation.