name: hackernews-frontpage
description: Scrape the Hacker News front page (titles, points, comment counts).
host: news.ycombinator.com
trusted: true
source: human
version: 1.0.0
args: []
triggers:
  - scrape hacker news frontpage
  - scrape hn frontpage
  - get hn top stories
  - latest hacker news stories

Hacker News front-page scraper

Scrapes the Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) front page and returns the top 30 stories as JSON. Each story has its rank, title, link URL, point count, and comment count.

Usage

$ $B skill run hackernews-frontpage
{
  "stories": [
    { "rank": 1, "title": "...", "url": "...", "points": 412, "comments": 87 },
    ...
  ],
  "count": 30
}

How it works

1. Navigates to https://news.ycombinator.com via the daemon.
2. Reads the page HTML.
3. Parses each story row (HN's stable tr.athing structure) into a typed

Story record.

1. Emits a single JSON document on stdout.

Why this is the reference skill

hackernews-frontpage is the smallest interesting browser-skill: no auth, stable HTML, deterministic output, file-fixture-friendly. Every Phase 1 component (SDK, scoped tokens, three-tier lookup, spawn lifecycle) is exercised by $B skill run hackernews-frontpage and the bundled script.test.ts.

When the HN HTML rotates and our selectors break, the test fails against the captured fixture before users notice. That's the point.