Harmonia uses Hacker News’s official Algolia API as a keyless, read-only source of current public stories. It does not scrape Hacker News pages or treat popularity as customer research.
How Harmonia uses it
Nova’s trend-scan and signal-watch skills can call fetch_trend_signals or search_trend_signals. Proactive checks may use the same bounded signal client. Results normalize title, URL, points, and comment count.
Each successful envelope contains a dataset evidence ID and record-level evidence IDs for returned stories. Nova must display the exact IDs supporting factual claims, and its runtime validator binds them to the actual tool trace.
Security and authority
The integration is public and read-only. Signals can inform proposed angles but cannot authorize content, prove a trend beyond the returned sample, or override source-grounding requirements.
Failure behavior
Empty results are reported as no data. Dependency failures return typed envelopes and permit at most one retry when explicitly retryable. The model cannot substitute remembered trends.
Evidence status
Normalization, mock fixtures, tool envelopes, citations, and failure behavior have automated coverage. Current-story claims require a live response captured for that invocation.
Relevant files
agent/harmonia_agent/signals.pyagent/harmonia_agent/skills_runtime.pyagent/harmonia_agent/nova_liaison.pyagent/harmonia_agent/skills/trend-scan/SKILL.md
Last modified on August 28, 2026
