How to integrate Hackernews MCP with Atomic Agent

Connect Atomic Agent to Hackernews MCP. Summarize today's top hacker news stories, find recent posts about ai startups, and more using natural language, with authentication handled for you.

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Hacker News is a tech-focused news aggregator by Y Combinator featuring user-driven stories and discussions on startups and programming. It's a go-to source for trending tech news and thoughtful community insights.

14 Tools

Introduction

Atomic Agent is an open-source AI agent that runs on your machine and supports local models through llama.cpp. Connect it to 1,500+ apps through Composio, including Hackernews.

This guide uses Atomic Agent's built-in Composio integration. You need Atomic Agent v0.5.6 or later, your own Composio API key, and a Hackernews account. See the Atomic Agent documentation for installation instructions.

Also integrate Hackernews with

How Atomic Agent connects to Hackernews

Atomic Agent connects to Composio's Tool Router over Streamable HTTP MCP. It discovers the tools needed for your request, and Composio handles account authentication.

Execution and account-connection tools follow Atomic Agent's configured approval policy. Review any approval prompt before allowing an action on your connected account.

Connect Hackernews to Atomic Agent

  1. Sign up or sign in to the Composio dashboard. Copy your API key.
  2. In Atomic Agent, open the Integrations tab and select Composio. Select API key, press e, paste the key, and press Enter. The tools become available immediately, without a restart.
  3. Ask Atomic Agent to do something in Hackernews. It searches Composio for the right tool.
  4. On first use, open the sign-in link returned in the chat. Connect your Hackernews account, then return to Atomic Agent to continue.

Headless setup

Add the following line to ~/.atomic-agent/.env, replacing YOUR_COMPOSIO_API_KEY with your key. Start Atomic Agent after saving the file.

bash
COMPOSIO_API_KEY=YOUR_COMPOSIO_API_KEY

What is the Hackernews MCP server, and what's possible with it?

The Hackernews MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to the Hacker News platform. It provides structured and secure access to top tech stories, user profiles, and community discussions, so your agent can fetch trending posts, search for news, analyze user activity, and surface the latest updates on your behalf.

  • Frontpage highlights and trending tech stories: Instantly get the current frontpage posts so your agent can summarize or monitor what's hot in tech right now.
  • Smart post search and discovery: Search Hacker News posts by keyword, filter results, and explore relevant discussions tailored to your interests.
  • Real-time updates on new posts: Let your agent fetch the latest or today's posts, keeping you in the loop on breaking news and emerging trends.
  • In-depth post and comment analysis: Retrieve detailed information about any specific Hacker News item, including stories and comment threads, for deeper insights.
  • User profile lookup and insights: Access details about any Hacker News user, helping you analyze activity, contributions, or community reputation.

Use Hackernews from Atomic Agent

With your account connected, ask Atomic Agent to work with Hackernews in natural language. You can connect more apps through the same Composio integration as you need them.

Visit the Atomic Agent website or inspect the Atomic Agent source code.

Troubleshooting

Why is my API key rejected?

Copy the key directly from the Composio dashboard. Atomic Agent requires ASCII characters because it sends the key in an HTTP header. Remove any extra characters introduced when copying.

Why are Composio tools unavailable after saving a key?

Check that you use Atomic Agent v0.5.6 or later and that Composio is enabled in your configuration. A "composio": { "enabled": false } setting disables the integration while keeping the saved key on disk.

Does Composio have a free plan?

The Hobby plan includes 100,000 tool calls per month. Composio-managed OAuth apps have a lower included allowance. See Composio pricing for the current limits that apply to your connection.

TOOLS

Supported Tools

Every Hackernews action and event your agent gets out of the box.

Get Ask HN Story IDs

Get up to 200 latest Ask HN story IDs from Hacker News.

Get Best HackerNews Stories

Get up to 500 best story IDs from HackerNews ranked by score.

Get Hacker News Item

Tool to get a Hacker News item by its unique ID from the Firebase API.

Get Hackernews Item

Get a specific item from Hacker News using its ID.

Get Job Story IDs

Get up to 200 latest job story IDs from Hacker News.

Get Latest Hackernews Posts

Get the latest posts from Hacker News based on optional filters.

Get Max Item ID

Tool to get the current largest item ID from Hacker News.

Get New Hacker News Stories

Get up to 500 newest story IDs from Hacker News.

Get Show HN Stories

Tool to retrieve up to 200 latest Show HN story IDs from Hacker News.

Get Top HackerNews Stories

Get up to 500 top story IDs from HackerNews including jobs.

Get Hacker News Updates

Get recently changed items and user profiles from Hacker News.

Get Hacker News User

Retrieve a Hacker News user's public profile by their username.

Get HackerNews User by Username

Tool to get a user profile by their case-sensitive username from the HackerNews Firebase API.

Search Hackernews Posts

Search Hacker News posts using full-text search powered by Algolia.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

With a standalone Hackernews MCP server, the agents and LLMs can only access a fixed set of Hackernews tools tied to that server. However, with the Composio Tool Router, agents can dynamically load tools from Hackernews and many other apps based on the task at hand, all through a single MCP endpoint.

Yes, you can. Atomic Agent fully supports MCP integration. You get structured tool calling, message history handling, and model orchestration while Tool Router takes care of discovering and serving the right Hackernews tools.

Yes, absolutely. You can configure which Hackernews scopes and actions are allowed when connecting your account to Composio. You can also bring your own OAuth credentials or API configuration so you keep full control over what the agent can do.

All sensitive data such as tokens, keys, and configuration is fully encrypted at rest and in transit. Composio is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and follows strict security practices so your Hackernews data and credentials are handled as safely as possible.

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