April 15, 2026
CLI drama, zero install karma
Hacker News CLI
Hacker News gets a command-line toy… but forgets the ‘How to use it’ bit, enraging the nerds
TLDR: A new tool lets geeks browse Hacker News from a text-only screen, but the page forgot to explain how to actually get it. Commenters are roasting the missing install instructions while old-school users brag they’ve been doing this for years with other tools that *do* share their links.
A new command-line toy for browsing Hacker News — the popular tech gossip site for programmers — just dropped, and the tool’s page proudly shows off all the fancy commands. You can list stories, jump to them, read comments, even post replies, all from a black-and-white terminal window like it’s 1995. Very cool… in theory.
But the real story? The developer forgot the one thing everyone actually needs: how to install it. No download link, no code, no nothing. Commenter garyfirestorm instantly slammed the page for having “no information about installation – no GitHub repo,” and others piled on. israrkhan roasted the launch harder, saying it feels like “the developer does not want anyone to use this tool.” Ouch.
Then the hipsters of Hacker News arrived. One proudly flexed, “I already use a HN cli called w3m,” basically saying, I was reading Hacker News in the terminal before it was cool. Another user casually revealed they’ve been using ancient text browsers like Lynx and Gopher all along, as if to say, welcome to a party we started 20 years ago.
So while the tool itself promises hacker chic, the community is split between annoyed (“where’s the install button?”) and amused veterans who claim they’ve already solved this problem with older, weirder tools — and actual links.
Key Points
- •“hn” is a command-line interface for interacting with HackerNews.
- •Global options include --version and --help for the base command and each subcommand.
- •The “stories” command lists stories, with options to sort by newest or best and to set a limit on the number of stories shown.
- •The “go” command opens a specific HackerNews story by requiring a STORY_ID.
- •The “comments” command displays comments for a story, and the “comment” command posts a comment; both require a STORY_ID.