name: rss-feeds description: RSS Feeds & Hacker News API — fetch RSS/Atom feeds, HN stories, search, and comments (free, no auth) integration: none

RSS Feeds & Hacker News API

Authentication

• Env var: None required (RSS feeds and Hacker News API are free)
• Credentials: No credentials needed
• RSS Base URL: Direct feed URLs
• Hacker News Base URL: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0

Fetch Any RSS/Atom Feed

# Fetch and parse an RSS feed
curl -s "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss"

# Fetch a specific blog feed
curl -s "https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/feed"

# TechCrunch RSS
curl -s "https://techcrunch.com/feed/"

# The Verge RSS
curl -s "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml"

Parsing RSS XML

Each <item> contains:

• <title> — article headline
• <link> — article URL
• <pubDate> — publication date
• <description> — summary/snippet
• <creator> or <author> — author name

Parsing Atom XML

Each <entry> contains:

• <title> — article headline
• <link href="..."/> — article URL
• <published> or <updated> — timestamp
• <summary> or <content> — body text
• <author><name> — author name

Hacker News — Top Stories

# Get top story IDs
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json"

# Get details for a specific story
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{STORY_ID}.json"

Story Item Fields

• id — item ID
• title — story title
• url — external link (if any)
• score — upvote count
• by — author username
• time — Unix timestamp
• descendants — comment count
• kids — array of comment IDs

Fetch Top N Stories

# Get top 10 story IDs, then fetch each
STORY_IDS=$(curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json" | python3 -c "import sys,json; print(' '.join(str(i) for i in json.load(sys.stdin)[:10]))")

for id in $STORY_IDS; do
  curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/${id}.json" | python3 -c "import sys,json; d=json.load(sys.stdin); print(f\"{d.get('title','')} ({d.get('score',0)} pts, {d.get('descendants',0)} comments)\")"
done

Hacker News — Search

Use the Algolia HN Search API:

curl -s "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=react+server+components&tags=story&hitsPerPage=10"

Search Parameters

• query — search terms
• tags=story — stories only (use comment for comments, poll for polls)
• hitsPerPage — results per page (default 20)
• page — page number for pagination
• numericFilters — e.g., points>100, created_at_i>1700000000

Search by Date (Recent)

curl -s "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=AI&tags=story&hitsPerPage=10"

Hacker News — Comments

# Get a story's comments (kids array contains comment IDs)
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{STORY_ID}.json" | python3 -c "
import sys, json
d = json.load(sys.stdin)
for kid in d.get('kids', [])[:5]:
    print(kid)
"

# Fetch a specific comment
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{COMMENT_ID}.json"

Hacker News — Best/New/Ask/Show

# Best stories
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/beststories.json"

# Newest stories
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/newstories.json"

# Ask HN
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/askstories.json"

# Show HN
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/showstories.json"

Read Full Article Content

To extract article text from a URL (for summarization):

# Use a readability extractor or fetch raw HTML
curl -sL "https://example.com/article" | python3 -c "
import sys
from html.parser import HTMLParser
# Basic text extraction — for production, use a proper readability library
print(sys.stdin.read()[:5000])
"

Error Handling

• Feed URL returns HTML: The URL may not be an RSS feed — look for /feed, /rss, or /atom.xml paths
• HN API 404: Story/comment ID doesn't exist
• Algolia rate limit: ~10,000 requests/day, be conservative
• Feed parse errors: Some feeds have malformed XML — handle gracefully, skip bad items
• Timeout on slow feeds: Set curl --max-time 10 for unreliable sources
• No authentication errors possible — all APIs are free