Understanding Comment Threads

Comment threads on Hacker News contain some of the most valuable insights and technical discussions on the web. The Hacker News MCP Server makes it simple to access and navigate these conversations through natural language requests to your AI assistant.

Retrieving Individual Comments

To access a specific comment, you'll need its unique identifier. Simply ask your AI assistant to retrieve the comment by its ID, and the server will return structured information including the comment text, author, timestamp, score, and its position in the thread hierarchy. This is useful when you have a direct link to a comment or are following up on a specific discussion point.

Exploring Full Comment Trees

When you want to understand the complete conversation around a story, request the full comment thread for that submission. The server retrieves the entire discussion tree, showing how comments relate to each other through parent-child relationships. This hierarchical structure lets you see which comments are direct replies and how conversations branch into sub-discussions.

Ask your assistant to "show me the comments on story [ID]" or "get the discussion for [story title]" to retrieve the full thread. The server organizes comments to preserve their nested structure, making it easy to follow conversation flow.

Navigating Thread Hierarchy

Hacker News discussions can branch into multiple conversation paths. Each comment may have several replies, which themselves may have replies, creating a tree structure. When you retrieve a comment thread, pay attention to the parent-child relationships in the data. Comments with the same parent are sibling discussions, while comments with different nesting levels represent how deeply a particular conversation thread has evolved.

This hierarchical organization helps you identify the most active discussion branches and locate specific sub-conversations within larger threads.

Filtering and Analysis

Once you've retrieved a comment thread, you can ask your AI assistant to help analyze the discussion. Request summaries of key points, identify the most upvoted comments, or find contributions from specific users. The server provides all the necessary data—including scores, timestamps, and author information—enabling sophisticated analysis of community sentiment and expert opinions.

Practical Tips

For active discussions, comments may be added continuously. Request fresh data when you need the latest responses. When exploring lengthy threads, consider asking your assistant to summarize main discussion points first before diving into specific branches that interest you.