How to connect Hackernews to Claude Cowork

Cowork is Anthropic's AI agent for knowledge work. Think of it as Claude Code for everything else. It works autonomously with your computer, local files, and applications to accomplish complex tasks. This guide walks you through the easiest and most secure way to connect your Hackernews account to Cowork via Composio Connect, enabling it to summarize today's top Hacker News stories, find recent posts about AI startups, show comments from this frontpage post, and more such actions on your behalf without compromising your account security.

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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

Cowork is Anthropic's AI agent for knowledge work. Think of it as Claude Code for everything else. It works autonomously with your computer, local files, and applications to accomplish complex tasks.

This guide walks you through the easiest and most secure way to connect your Hackernews account to Cowork via Composio Connect, enabling it to summarize today's top Hacker News stories, find recent posts about AI startups, show comments from this frontpage post, and more such actions on your behalf without compromising your account security.

Also integrate Hackernews with

Connecting Hackernews to Claude Cowork

1. Open Customize

In Claude Desktop, click Customize in the left sidebar, then select Connectors and click the + icon at the top.

Claude Desktop connectors screen with Add custom connector selected

2. Add the Composio MCP server

Click Add custom connector and paste in the Composio MCP server URL:

bash
https://connect.composio.dev/mcp
Add custom connector dialog with Composio MCP server URL

3. Authorize in your browser

Click Connect. You'll be redirected to a browser window where you can authorize Composio to continue.

Composio authorization screen for Claude Cowork

4. Connect your Hackernews account

Back in Cowork, ask the agent to connect to Hackernews or give it any Hackernews-related task.

For example, ask Cowork to:

  • "Summarize today's top Hacker News stories"
  • "Find recent posts about AI startups"
  • "Show comments from this frontpage post"

It will prompt you to authenticate and authorize access.

That's it. Composio's tools are now available in Cowork, and your Hackernews account is ready to use.

What is Claude Cowork?

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's agent for general knowledge work. It can use your computer, files, and connected applications to complete longer-running tasks across your work tools.

With Composio Connect, Cowork can securely access apps like Hackernews through MCP without you sharing account credentials directly with the agent.

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.
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. Claude Cowork 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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