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Hackernews Frontpage

  • 160 installs
  • 126k repo stars
  • Updated July 15, 2026
  • garrytan/gstack

Scrapes the Hacker News front page and returns the top 30 stories as JSON with rank, title, URL, points, and comment counts.

About

A reference browser skill that parses the HN front-page HTML into typed story records and emits JSON. A developer uses it to pull HN top stories or as the smallest example of the gstack browser-skill pattern.

  • Parses HN's stable tr.athing rows into typed records
  • Fixture-backed test catches selector breakage

Hackernews Frontpage by the numbers

  • 160 all-time installs (skills.sh)
  • Ranked #641 of 2,715 Automation & Workflows skills by installs in the Skillselion catalog
  • Data as of Aug 5, 2026 (Skillselion catalog sync)
npx skills add https://github.com/garrytan/gstack --skill hackernews-frontpage

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Listed on Skillselion
Installs160
repo stars126k
Last updatedJuly 15, 2026
Repositorygarrytan/gstack

What it does

Scrapes the Hacker News front page and returns the top 30 stories as JSON with rank, title, URL, points, and comment counts.

Files

SKILL.mdMarkdownGitHub ↗

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. 4. 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.

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