Overview

When working with Hacker News content, you'll often need to retrieve specific items like stories, comments, or polls using their unique identifiers. Each item on Hacker News has a numeric ID that you can use to access detailed information about that particular piece of content. This guide explains how to query specific items by their ID through the Hacker News MCP Server.

Understanding Hacker News Item IDs

Every story, comment, poll, and job posting on Hacker News is assigned a unique numeric identifier. You'll typically encounter these IDs when browsing Hacker News URLs (they appear as the id parameter) or when retrieving lists of stories that return arrays of item IDs. These identifiers are permanent and can be used to reliably access the same content over time.

Querying an Item by ID

To retrieve a specific item, simply ask your AI assistant to fetch the Hacker News item with the desired ID. For example, you might say "Get Hacker News item 38471234" or "Show me details for item ID 38471234."

The server will return comprehensive information about that item, including:

• Type: Whether it's a story, comment, poll, or job posting
• Author: The username of who submitted it
• Time: When it was posted (as a Unix timestamp)
• Text or URL: The content or link associated with the item
• Score: Current points from community voting (for stories)
• Comments: Array of child comment IDs (if applicable)
• Parent: Reference to the parent item (for comments)

Common Use Cases

Following Comment Threads

When you retrieve a story, you'll receive an array of comment IDs. You can then query each comment ID individually to read the full discussion. This is particularly useful for deep-diving into technical conversations or finding specific commentary.

Tracking Specific Stories

If you're monitoring how a particular story performs over time, you can repeatedly query its ID to see updated scores, new comments, and changing rankings. This helps you understand how community engagement evolves.

Researching Historical Content

With a known item ID from a previous search or archive, you can retrieve that exact content regardless of whether it's still on the front page. This makes the ID-based query method ideal for research and reference purposes.

Tips for Effective Querying

Start with broader queries like "top stories" to discover interesting item IDs, then drill down into specific items that catch your attention. When exploring comment threads, query parent items first to understand context before diving into individual comments. Remember that deleted or dead items may return minimal information, so always check the item status in the returned data.