Quick start

Once hn is on your PATH, start with the front page:

hn top -n5

RANK  ID        TYPE   TITLE                          SCORE  COMMENTS  BY
1     48517377  story  Noise infusion banned from...  723    455       nl
2     48518684  story  GLM 5.2 Is Out                 341    190       aloknnikhil
3     48516251  story  Every Frame Perfect            550    180       ravenical
...

Read a thread

Pass a story id (or paste its URL) to item. --depth controls how far down the comment tree it walks:

hn item 48517377 --depth 1       # the story and its top-level comments
hn item 48517377 --depth -1      # the whole thread

Search

hn search "rust" -n10
hn search "postgres" --sort date         # newest first
hn search "llm" --since 24h --points 100 # last day, at least 100 points

Pipe it anywhere

At a terminal you get a table. In a pipe you get JSONL, so jq and friends just work with no flags:

hn top -n20 | jq -r '.title'        # titles only
hn top -n50 -o url > reading.txt    # a link queue
hn ask -n30 --fields score,title -o csv > ask.csv

Next

• The guides walk through common jobs end to end.
• The CLI reference lists every command and flag.
• Output formats covers -o, --fields, and templates.