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Querying Specific Items by ID
Overview
When working with Hacker News content, you'll often need to access specific items directly rather than browsing through lists. Every story, comment, and poll on Hacker News has a unique numerical identifier (ID) that you can use to retrieve it instantly. This guide explains how to query specific items by their ID using the Hacker News MCP Server.
Understanding Hacker News IDs
Each piece of content on Hacker News—whether it's a story, comment, job posting, or poll—receives a unique ID when it's created. These IDs are sequential integers that increment over time. You'll encounter these IDs in URLs (like news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678), in API responses when browsing story lists, or when exploring comment threads.
Querying an Item by ID
To retrieve a specific item, you can ask your AI assistant to fetch it using its ID. Simply reference the item number in your request. For example:
- "Get Hacker News item 12345678"
- "Show me the details for HN story 38471234"
- "Retrieve comment 38472156 from Hacker News"
The server will return comprehensive information about the item, including its type (story, comment, poll, etc.), author, timestamp, text content, score, and any associated metadata like URLs or parent items.
What You'll Receive
When you query a specific item, the response includes all available data about that item:
For stories and links: You'll get the title, URL (if external), submission time, author username, current score, and the number of comments. You'll also receive the item's descendants, which represents the total discussion size.
For comments: The response includes the comment text, author, timestamp, and references to both the parent item (what the comment replies to) and any child comments (replies to this comment).
For polls: You'll see the poll question, options, and voting information.
Practical Applications
Querying by ID is particularly useful when you want to:
- Follow up on specific discussions you've previously encountered
- Deep-dive into particular comment threads by retrieving each comment in sequence
- Monitor specific submissions over time to see how scores and comment counts evolve
- Extract complete discussion trees by starting with a story ID and recursively fetching all its comments
- Analyze specific pieces of content that have been referenced in external sources
Tips for Working with IDs
Keep in mind that IDs only work for existing items. If you request an ID that doesn't exist or hasn't been created yet, the query won't return any data. Additionally, some very old items may have limited metadata due to changes in how Hacker News stored data historically.
When exploring comment threads, you'll often retrieve a parent item first, then use the comment IDs listed in its response to fetch individual comments, building a complete picture of the discussion.
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