Understanding the Two Approaches

The Hacker News MCP Server offers two distinct methods for accessing content: querying specific items by their unique ID or browsing curated story lists. Each approach serves different purposes and understanding when to use each will help you work more efficiently with Hacker News data.

Browsing Story Lists

Story lists provide curated views of Hacker News content, similar to what you see when visiting the website directly. The server supports accessing top stories (front page content ranked by community voting), new stories (recent submissions in chronological order), and best stories (high-quality content that has demonstrated lasting value).

This approach is ideal when you want to understand what's currently trending, discover new content, or get a general sense of community interests. For example, if you're conducting trend analysis or looking for interesting articles to read, browsing story lists gives you a broad view of active discussions.

Story lists return multiple items at once, typically including basic metadata like titles, URLs, scores, and author information. This makes it easy to scan through content quickly and identify items worth deeper investigation.

Querying by ID

Every item on Hacker News—whether a story, comment, or poll—has a unique numeric identifier. When you know the specific ID of an item you're interested in, you can query it directly to retrieve detailed information about that single item.

This approach is most useful when you're following up on specific content. Perhaps you saw a story ID mentioned elsewhere, want to retrieve a particular comment thread, or need to get updated information about an item you've previously accessed. Direct ID queries are also essential when traversing comment trees, as each comment has its own ID and references its parent and children by their IDs.

Querying by ID typically returns more complete information about an item than you'd get from a list view, including full comment text, complete user details, and all metadata associated with that specific item.

Choosing the Right Method

Use browsing when you're exploring, discovering, or monitoring general activity. Use ID queries when you're investigating specific items, following comment threads, or need detailed information about known content.

In practice, you'll often combine both approaches: browse lists to discover interesting stories, then query specific IDs to dive deep into comment discussions or retrieve full details about items that caught your attention.