Understanding Story Feeds

The Hacker News MCP server provides access to multiple story feeds that reflect different aspects of community activity. Each feed serves a specific purpose and helps you stay connected with the conversations that matter most to the tech community.

Top Stories represent submissions that have gained significant traction through community votes and engagement. These are the posts currently featured on Hacker News' front page—the stories that thousands of users are reading and discussing right now. When you retrieve top stories, you're tapping into what the community has collectively decided is most valuable or interesting at this moment.

New Stories give you access to the latest submissions as they arrive on the platform. This feed is perfect for staying ahead of trends, discovering content before it goes viral, or monitoring for specific topics as they're posted. Unlike top stories, new submissions haven't been filtered by community voting yet, giving you a raw view of incoming content.

Best Stories highlight submissions that have demonstrated sustained value over time. These stories have earned their place through consistent engagement and high scores, representing content the community has deemed exceptionally worthwhile.

Retrieving Stories

To access these feeds through the server, simply make natural language requests to your AI assistant. You might ask to "show me the top stories on Hacker News" or "what are the latest submissions about artificial intelligence." The server handles the technical details of fetching and formatting the data.

Each story response includes essential information: the title, URL to the original content, current score (upvotes), submission time, author username, and the number of comments. This structured data makes it easy to quickly scan multiple stories and identify which ones warrant deeper investigation.

Working with Story Data

Once you've retrieved stories, you can drill deeper into any that interest you. Request the full comment thread to read community discussion, look up the submitter's profile to understand their perspective, or track how a story's score changes over time to gauge community response.

The story feeds update in real-time, so repeated queries will reflect current activity. This makes the server valuable for monitoring breaking news, tracking specific topics, or simply staying current with tech community conversations throughout your day.