name: headlines
description: Fetch news headlines from free sources (no API key required).
homepage: https://news.ycombinator.com
metadata: {"openclaw":{"emoji":"📰","requires":{"bins":["curl","jq"]}}}

Headlines

Get news headlines from multiple free sources. No API keys needed.

Hacker News

Top Stories

# Get top 10 HN stories
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json" | jq '.[0:10]' | \
  while read id; do
    curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/${id//[^0-9]/}.json" 2>/dev/null | jq -r '"\(.score) pts | \(.title)"'
  done

Simpler Version

# Top 5 HN titles (quick)
for id in $(curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json" | jq '.[0:5][]'); do
  curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/$id.json" | jq -r '.title'
done

New Stories

curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/newstories.json" | jq '.[0:5]'

Reddit

Subreddit Headlines

# Top posts from a subreddit
curl -s "https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/hot.json?limit=10" \
  -H "User-Agent: OpenClaw/1.0" | \
  jq '.data.children[].data | {title, score, url}'

Front Page

curl -s "https://www.reddit.com/.json?limit=10" \
  -H "User-Agent: OpenClaw/1.0" | \
  jq '.data.children[].data | "\(.score) | \(.title)"'

Wikipedia Current Events

# Today's current events (parsed from main page)
curl -s "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Portal:Current_events" | \
  jq '{title: .title, extract: .extract}'

RSS Feeds (via rss2json)

# Any RSS feed to JSON (free tier: 10k requests/day)
curl -s "https://api.rss2json.com/v1/api.json?rss_url=https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml" | \
  jq '.items[0:5] | .[] | {title, pubDate}'

Quick One-Liners

# Top HN story title
curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/$(curl -s https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json | jq '.[0]').json" | jq -r '.title'

# Reddit r/news top title
curl -s "https://www.reddit.com/r/news/hot.json?limit=1" -H "User-Agent: Bot" | jq -r '.data.children[0].data.title'

Tech-Specific

AI/ML News (r/MachineLearning)

curl -s "https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/hot.json?limit=5" \
  -H "User-Agent: OpenClaw/1.0" | \
  jq '.data.children[].data.title'

Crypto News (r/CryptoCurrency)

curl -s "https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/hot.json?limit=5" \
  -H "User-Agent: OpenClaw/1.0" | \
  jq '.data.children[].data.title'

Rate Limits

• Hacker News: No official limit (be respectful)
• Reddit: ~60 requests/minute with User-Agent
• rss2json: 10,000/day free tier

Tips

• Always set User-Agent for Reddit
• Cache results to avoid redundant fetches
• HN IDs are sequential - higher = newer