What is Story Data?

When you retrieve stories from Hacker News through the MCP server, each story comes with a rich set of metadata that helps you understand its context, popularity, and timing. Learning to interpret this data effectively will help you make better use of the information you retrieve.

Understanding Scores

The score represents the number of upvotes a story has received from the Hacker News community. This metric is crucial for understanding how well a story has been received:

• Higher scores typically indicate content that the community finds valuable, interesting, or newsworthy
• Scores are dynamic and can change over time as more users vote
• A score of 100+ generally indicates a story that has gained significant traction
• Top stories on the front page often have scores ranging from several hundred to over a thousand

When analyzing stories, consider the score in relation to the story's age. A newer story with 50 points may be trending faster than an older story with 100 points.

Interpreting Timestamps

Timestamps tell you when content was submitted to Hacker News. The server typically provides these in Unix timestamp format (seconds since January 1, 1970) or as formatted datetime strings.

Understanding timestamps helps you:

• Identify breaking news and fresh content versus older discussions
• Calculate how quickly a story is gaining traction by comparing score to age
• Track when users were most active in submitting or commenting
• Filter content based on specific time periods

A useful technique is combining timestamp and score data to identify stories that are "heating up"—relatively new submissions accumulating votes quickly often indicate emerging trends.

Additional Metadata Fields

Stories include several other important metadata fields:

Author (by): The username of the person who submitted the story. This helps you identify submissions from known community members or track particular users' activity.

Type: Indicates the item type—usually "story" for submissions, but can also be "poll" or other types.

Descendants: Shows the total number of comments on a story, giving you an immediate sense of how much discussion the topic has generated.

URL: The link to the external article or resource being discussed. Not all stories have URLs—some are "Ask HN" or "Show HN" text posts.

Title: The headline of the story as it appears on Hacker News.

Putting It All Together

When evaluating stories, consider all metadata holistically. A story with a high score, recent timestamp, and many descendants likely represents an important, actively discussed topic. Conversely, older stories with sustained high scores indicate content with lasting value to the community. Use these signals to prioritize which stories to read, which discussions to explore, and which trends to monitor.