What Story Data Tells You

Every story on Hacker News comes with rich metadata that helps you understand its reach, timing, and context within the community. When you retrieve story data through the MCP server, you'll receive several key pieces of information that tell the complete picture of a submission.

Understanding Scores

The score represents the number of upvotes a story has received from the Hacker News community. This metric is fundamental to understanding a story's popularity and perceived value. A higher score indicates that more users found the content worthy of attention, though it's important to remember that scores evolve over time as more users vote.

When analyzing scores, consider them in context with the story's age. A story with 50 points that's only an hour old is performing very differently from one with 50 points that's been live for twelve hours. Scores help you identify which topics are resonating with the community and which discussions are generating the most interest.

Timestamps and Time-Based Analysis

Timestamps tell you exactly when a story was submitted to Hacker News. This temporal data is crucial for several reasons. First, it allows you to track how quickly stories gain traction—a rapid accumulation of points suggests particularly compelling content or timely topics. Second, timestamps help you understand the freshness of information, which is essential when monitoring breaking news or emerging trends.

The server provides timestamps in a structured format, making it easy to sort stories chronologically, filter by date ranges, or analyze submission patterns over time. You might discover that certain types of content perform better at specific times, or identify when breaking news first appeared on the platform.

Additional Metadata

Beyond scores and timestamps, story data includes the submitter's username, the story URL (for link submissions), the number of comments, and the story type. The comment count is particularly valuable—stories with many comments often indicate controversial topics or deep technical discussions that go beyond the linked article itself.

The submitter information lets you track who's consistently sharing valuable content, while the story type helps you distinguish between external links, Ask HN posts, Show HN submissions, and other categories that serve different purposes within the community.

Putting It All Together

By combining these metadata elements, you can develop sophisticated insights into Hacker News activity. Track which topics are trending by monitoring recent high-score stories, identify emerging discussions by watching new submissions with growing comment counts, or research historical patterns by analyzing timestamp and score correlations over time.