#tabularis-hackernews-plugin

A Hacker News plugin for Tabularis, the lightweight database management tool.

This plugin turns the HN public API into a queryable SQL database. Stories, comments, users and polls become real tables. Full SQL support via an in-memory DuckDB engine — JOIN across tables, GROUP BY, window functions, CTEs.

No authentication required — uses the public Firebase API. No runtime dependencies: ships as a single compiled binary.

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#Table of Contents

• Features
• Installation
  • Automatic (via Tabularis)
  • Manual Installation
• How It Works
• Settings
• Example Queries
• Supported Operations
• Development
• Changelog
• License

#Features

• Zero auth — reads the public HN Firebase API, no API key needed.
• Real SQL — DuckDB handles all query execution: JOIN, GROUP BY, subqueries, CTEs, window functions.
• Auto-refresh — configurable TTL to reload data periodically without restarting the connection.
• 6 feed types — top, new, best, ask, show, jobs.
• 4 tables — stories, comments (nested BFS fetch), users (author profiles), poll_options.
• Schema Inspection — browse tables and columns in the sidebar explorer.
• ER Diagram — visualize relationships between tables.
• Cross-platform — works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. No runtime dependencies.

#Installation

#Automatic (via Tabularis)

Open Settings → Available Plugins in Tabularis and install Hacker News from the plugin registry.

#Manual Installation

1. Download the latest release archive for your platform from the Releases page.
2. Extract the archive.
3. Copy tabularis-hackernews-plugin (or tabularis-hackernews-plugin.exe on Windows) and .tabularium into the Tabularis plugins directory:

4. Make the binary executable (Linux/macOS):

chmod +x ~/.local/share/tabularis/plugins/hackernews/tabularis-hackernews-plugin

5. Restart Tabularis.

#How It Works

The plugin is a compiled Rust binary that communicates with Tabularis through JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio:

1. Tabularis spawns tabularis-hackernews-plugin as a child process.
2. Requests are sent as newline-delimited JSON-RPC messages to the plugin's stdin.
3. Responses are written to stdout in the same format.

On the first execute_query, the plugin fetches story IDs from the selected feed, loads each item from the HN API concurrently into an in-memory DuckDB database, and keeps it alive for the session. DuckDB handles all query execution.

If cache_ttl_minutes is set, the snapshot is automatically rebuilt after that interval — no need to restart the connection.

All debug output is written to stderr and appears in Tabularis's log viewer — stdout is reserved exclusively for JSON-RPC responses.

#Settings

Configure via Settings → gear icon next to the Hacker News driver.

#Example Queries

-- Top 10 stories by score
SELECT title, score, by, url
FROM stories
ORDER BY score DESC
LIMIT 10;

-- Who posts the most? And how well do they do?
SELECT by,
       COUNT(*)   AS posts,
       AVG(score) AS avg_score,
       MAX(score) AS best_score
FROM stories
GROUP BY by
ORDER BY posts DESC
LIMIT 10;

-- Stories linking to GitHub
SELECT title, url, score
FROM stories
WHERE url LIKE '%github.com%'
ORDER BY score DESC;

-- Comment activity per story (requires Include Comments = true)
SELECT s.title,
       s.score,
       COUNT(c.id)    AS loaded_comments,
       s.descendants  AS total_comments
FROM stories s
LEFT JOIN comments c ON c.story_id = s.id
GROUP BY s.id, s.title, s.score, s.descendants
ORDER BY loaded_comments DESC;

-- Rank stories by score within each type using a window function
SELECT title, type, score,
       RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY type ORDER BY score DESC) AS rank_in_type
FROM stories
ORDER BY type, rank_in_type;

-- Stories from the last 24 hours with at least 10 points
SELECT title, score, by,
       epoch_ms(time * 1000)::TIMESTAMP AS posted_at
FROM stories
WHERE time > epoch(now()) - 86400
  AND score >= 10
ORDER BY score DESC;

-- Top authors by karma (requires Include Users = true)
SELECT id, karma, submitted_count
FROM users
ORDER BY karma DESC
LIMIT 10;

#Supported Operations

#Development

#Building

cargo build --release

#Testing the Plugin

Test the plugin directly from your shell without opening Tabularis:

# initialize
echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"initialize","params":{"settings":{"story_type":"top","max_items":5,"include_comments":false,"timeout":10,"cache_ttl_minutes":0}},"id":1}' \
  | ./target/release/tabularis-hackernews-plugin

# execute a query (fetches live data)
echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"execute_query","params":{"params":{"driver":"hackernews","database":"hackernews"},"query":"SELECT title, score FROM stories ORDER BY score DESC LIMIT 3","page":1,"page_size":100},"id":2}' \
  | ./target/release/tabularis-hackernews-plugin

#Install Locally

A convenience script builds the project and copies the binary and manifest directly into your Tabularis plugins folder:

./sync.sh

#Tech Stack

• Language: Rust
• Query engine: DuckDB (in-memory)
• HTTP client: reqwest (async, rustls-tls)
• Async runtime: Tokio
• Data source: HN Firebase API
• Protocol: JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio

#Changelog

#License

Apache License 2.0