technews – OpenClaw Skill

---

name: technews description: Fetches top stories from TechMeme, summarizes linked articles, and highlights social media reactions. Use when user wants tech news or says /technews. metadata: {"openclaw":{"emoji":"📰"}}

TechNews Skill

Fetches top stories from TechMeme, summarizes linked articles, and highlights social media buzz.

Usage

Command: /technews

Fetches the top 10 stories from TechMeme, provides summaries from the linked articles, and highlights notable social media reactions.

Setup

This skill requires:

• Python 3.9+
• requests and beautifulsoup4 packages
• Optional: tiktoken for token-aware truncation

Install dependencies:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

Architecture

The skill works in three stages:

1. Scrape TechMeme — scripts/techmeme_scraper.py fetches and parses top stories
2. Fetch Articles — scripts/article_fetcher.py retrieves article content in parallel
3. Summarize — scripts/summarizer.py generates summaries and finds social reactions

Commands

/technews

Fetches and presents top tech news stories.

Output includes:

• Story title and original link
• AI-generated summary
• Social media highlights (Twitter reactions)
• Relevance score based on topic preferences

How It Works

1. Scrapes TechMeme's homepage for top stories (by default, top 10)
2. For each story, fetches the linked article
3. Generates a concise summary (2-3 sentences)
4. Checks for notable social media reactions
5. Presents results in a clean, readable format

State

• <workspace>/memory/technews_history.json — cache of recently fetched stories to avoid repeats

Examples

• /technews — Get the latest tech news summary

Future Expansion

This skill is designed to be extended to other sources:

• Hacker News (/hn)
• Reddit (/reddit)
• Other tech news aggregators

The modular architecture allows adding new source handlers without changing core functionality.

TechNews Skill for OpenClaw

A OpenClaw skill that fetches top tech stories from TechMeme, summarizes linked articles, and highlights social media reactions.

Features

• 📰 Scrapes top stories from TechMeme.com
• 📝 AI-generated summaries of article content
• 💬 Hacker News integration (shows points and comments)
• 🔥 Extracts notable quotes and "spicy" takes
• ⚡ Parallel fetching for speed

Installation

# Clone or add to your OpenClaw skills
cd /path/to/openclaw/skills
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/technews-skill.git

# Install dependencies
pip install requests beautifulsoup4

Usage

In OpenClaw, simply type:

/technews

This will fetch the top 10 stories and present them with:

• Story titles and links
• AI-generated summaries
• Hacker News engagement data
• Notable quotes and reactions

Architecture

technews/
├── SKILL.md              # OpenClaw skill definition
├── README.md            # This file
├── scripts/
│   ├── techmeme_scraper.py    # Fetches stories from TechMeme
│   ├── article_fetcher.py     # Parallel article fetching
│   ├── social_reactions.py    # HN and Twitter integration
│   └── technews.py            # Main orchestrator

Extending

This skill is designed to be extended to other sources:

• /hn - Hacker News top stories
• /reddit - Reddit tech threads
• /verge - The Verge coverage
• /wired - WIRED articles

Add new sources by creating additional scraper modules and updating the orchestrator.

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• requests
• beautifulsoup4
• OpenClaw (any recent version)

License

MIT