Understanding Item Identifiers

Every piece of content on Hacker News—whether it's a story, comment, poll, or job posting—has a unique numerical identifier. These identifiers are permanent and provide direct access to specific items without needing to search through feeds or navigate comment threads. When you know an item's ID, you can retrieve its complete information instantly.

Why Query by ID?

Querying items by their unique identifiers is the most precise way to access Hacker News content. You'll find this approach particularly useful when:

• Following up on a specific story or comment you've previously discovered
• Retrieving items referenced in external sources or shared links
• Building upon previous queries to explore related content
• Accessing deeply nested comments without traversing entire threads
• Implementing monitoring systems that track specific submissions over time

How to Request Specific Items

To query a specific item, simply ask your AI assistant to retrieve content using the item's numerical identifier. The identifier typically appears in Hacker News URLs (for example, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678).

You might phrase your request as:

• "Get Hacker News item 12345678"
• "Show me the details for item ID 12345678"
• "Retrieve the Hacker News post with ID 12345678"

The server will fetch the complete details for that specific item, including its type, content, metadata, and relationships to other items.

What You'll Receive

When you query an item by ID, the response includes comprehensive information about that item:

For stories: You'll receive the title, URL (if external), submission score, author, timestamp, and the number of comments. If it's a text post, you'll also get the full content.

For comments: The response includes the comment text, author, timestamp, score, and the parent item ID (which tells you what the comment responds to).

For other content types: Polls, job postings, and other item types return their relevant metadata and content.

Working with Parent and Child Items

Item IDs enable you to navigate Hacker News' hierarchical structure. Every comment has a parent ID pointing to what it replies to—either another comment or the original story. Stories have arrays of comment IDs representing direct replies. By requesting these related IDs sequentially, you can explore entire discussion threads with precision, jumping directly to conversations of interest rather than processing everything in between.

Practical Applications

Direct ID queries excel in several scenarios. When monitoring how a specific story evolves, you can repeatedly query its ID to track score changes and new comments. When analyzing discussions, you can jump directly to highly rated comments others have referenced. When building reports or archives, item IDs serve as permanent references that will always retrieve the same content, making your work reproducible and verifiable.