TinyHNews

A Ruby wrapper for the Hacker News API that fetches and displays top stories with comments and article content.

• Fetch top stories, new stories, and best stories from Hacker News
• Extract story details including title, author, score, comments
• Scrape and convert article content to Markdown
• Fetch nested comments with configurable depth and limits
• Command-line interface for easy terminal usage
• Support for concise output mode

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'tiny_hnews'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install tiny_hnews

The gem provides a tinyhn command for terminal usage:

# Fetch 5 top stories with default settings
$ tinyhn

# Fetch 10 stories with deeper comments
$ tinyhn -n 10 -d 3 -l 20

# Show concise output (titles and metadata only)
$ tinyhn -c

# Show only first 100 lines of each article
$ tinyhn --lines 100

• -n, --number NUMBER: Number of top stories to fetch (default: 5)
• -d, --depth DEPTH: Depth of comments to fetch (default: 2)
• -l, --limit LIMIT: Limit number of comments per story (default: 10)
• -c, --concise: Only show titles and metadata
• --lines NUMBER: Number of lines of the article to show (default: 50)
• -v, --version: Show version
• -h, --help: Show help

require 'tiny_hnews'

# Create a TopStories instance with custom options
top_stories = TinyHNews::TopStories.new(
  number_of_stories: 10,
  comments_depth: 2,
  comments_limit: 20
)

# Fetch the stories
top_stories.fetch

# Access the stories
top_stories.stories.each do |story|
  puts "Title: #{story.title}"
  puts "Author: #{story.by}"
  puts "Score: #{story.score}"
  puts "URL: #{story.url}"
  puts "Comments: #{story.comments.size}"
  puts "Article preview: #{story.article&.split("\n")&.first}"
  puts "---"
end

# Fetch a specific story by ID
story =
  TinyHNews::Story.new(
    id: 12345,
    comments_depth: 3,
    comments_limit: 50
  ).wrap

puts story.title
puts story.article
story.comments.each { |comment| puts "- #{comment}" }

Each Story object provides access to the following properties:

• id: Story ID
• title: Story title
• by: Author username
• url: Story URL
• text: Story text (for Ask HN, etc.)
• score: Story score
• time: Unix timestamp
• descendants: Number of descendants (comments)
• type: Item type (story, comment, etc.)
• kids: Array of comment IDs
• comments: Array of formatted comment texts
• article: Scraped article content in Markdown format

• faraday: HTTP client for API requests
• json: JSON parsing
• reverse_markdown: HTML to Markdown conversion

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Run the test suite with:

$ bundle exec rake test

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/fguillen/TinyHNews.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.