Browse the front page

hn mirrors the lists you see on the site. Each one takes -n to set how many stories to resolve.

hn top          # the front page (default 30)
hn best         # highest-rated recent stories
hn new          # newest submissions
hn ask          # Ask HN
hn show         # Show HN
hn jobs         # YC job posts

Show only what you care about

--fields trims the columns to the ones you want, in the order you list them:

hn top -n10 --fields rank,score,comments,title

Make a reading queue

The url format prints just the link for each story, which is exactly what a queue is:

hn top -n30 -o url > reading.txt

Self-posts (Ask HN and most jobs) have no external link, so their url falls back to the Hacker News discussion page. To always get the discussion link instead of the article, ask for the hn_url field:

hn top -n30 --fields hn_url -o raw

Sort and slice locally

Because every row is structured, you can post-process with ordinary tools:

hn top -n100 -o jsonl | jq -r 'select(.score > 500) | "\(.score)\t\(.title)"'