Overview

When working with the Hacker News MCP Server, you'll often need to retrieve specific items such as stories, comments, or user profiles using their unique identifiers. Every item on Hacker News has a numeric ID that serves as its permanent reference. This guide explains how to query these items directly by their IDs.

Understanding Hacker News IDs

Each piece of content on Hacker News—whether it's a story, comment, poll, or job posting—receives a unique numeric identifier when created. These IDs are sequential and permanent, meaning an item will always retain the same ID throughout its existence. You can typically find these IDs in Hacker News URLs: for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678 refers to item ID 12345678.

Querying Items by ID

To retrieve a specific item, simply reference its ID in your request to the MCP server. You can ask your AI assistant with natural language queries such as:

• "Get Hacker News item 12345678"
• "Show me details for story ID 38471920"
• "Retrieve comment with ID 38472105"

The server will fetch the requested item and return comprehensive information including its type (story, comment, poll, etc.), author, timestamp, content or URL, score, and any associated metadata.

What Information You'll Receive

When you query an item by ID, the response varies depending on the item type:

For stories, you'll receive the title, URL (if it's a link post), author username, submission time, current score, and the number of comments. If it's a text post ("Ask HN" or "Show HN"), you'll also get the body text.

For comments, the response includes the comment text, author, timestamp, parent item ID (the story or comment it's responding to), and any child comment IDs for threading.

For user profiles, you'll get the username, karma score, account creation date, and biographical information if available.

Practical Applications

Direct ID queries are particularly useful when you've identified an interesting item and want to retrieve its current state with updated scores and comment counts. They're also essential for navigating comment threads—once you have a parent comment's ID, you can retrieve its children to explore the conversation tree.

This approach is more efficient than searching when you already know exactly what you want, and it guarantees you'll retrieve the correct item since IDs are unique and immutable.

Tips for Success

Keep IDs handy when researching related content. If you're tracking a developing story, save its ID to check for new comments later. When exploring discussion threads, note the IDs of particularly insightful comments for easy retrieval and reference in your work.