What is Story Data?

When you retrieve stories from Hacker News through the MCP server, each story comes with a structured set of data fields that provide comprehensive information about the submission. Understanding these fields helps you extract exactly the information you need and interpret the data correctly.

Core Story Fields

Every story object contains several essential fields that describe the submission:

ID: A unique numeric identifier for each story. This ID is permanent and can be used to reference the specific story in future queries or to construct URLs to the original Hacker News page.

Title: The headline or title of the submission as written by the person who posted it. This is the primary text users see when browsing Hacker News.

URL: The link to the external content being shared. Note that some stories are "Ask HN" or "Show HN" posts without external links—these are text-based discussions hosted directly on Hacker News.

Score: The number of upvotes the story has received from the community. Higher scores generally indicate stories that the community finds valuable or interesting. Scores change over time as more users vote.

By: The username of the person who submitted the story. You can use this field to query user profiles or track submissions from specific community members.

Time: A Unix timestamp indicating when the story was submitted. This helps you understand how old a story is and track when discussions began.

Type: Identifies the item type, which will be "story" for standard submissions. The server also handles other types like "comment" and "poll" with similar data structures.

Discussion-Related Fields

Stories that generate discussion include additional fields:

Descendants: The total count of comments (including nested replies) on the story. This gives you a quick sense of how much discussion the story has generated.

Kids: An array of comment IDs that are direct replies to the story. You can use these IDs to retrieve the actual comment content and explore the discussion thread.

Working with Story Data

When analyzing stories, the combination of score, descendants, and time helps you understand engagement levels. A story with a high score but few comments might be appreciated but not controversial, while one with many comments relative to its score might indicate debate. The "by" field lets you identify prolific contributors or subject matter experts, while timestamps help you track how quickly stories gain traction.

Understanding this data structure enables you to ask more sophisticated questions through your AI assistant and interpret the responses with greater insight.