Overview

When working with Hacker News data, you'll often need to retrieve specific items such as stories, comments, or polls using their unique identifiers. Every item on Hacker News has a numerical ID that serves as its permanent reference. This guide explains how to query these specific items through the MCP server.

Understanding Item Identifiers

Each piece of content on Hacker News—whether it's a story, comment, poll, or job posting—is assigned a unique numerical identifier when it's created. These IDs are sequential and permanent, meaning an item will always retain the same ID. You can typically find these identifiers in the URL when viewing items on Hacker News itself (for example, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678).

Querying Items by ID

To retrieve a specific item, you simply need to request it using its numerical identifier. You can ask your AI assistant natural language questions that reference the ID, such as:

• "Get Hacker News item 38379956"
• "Show me the details for item ID 38379956"
• "Retrieve the comment with ID 38379956"

The server will fetch the item and return comprehensive information including its type (story, comment, poll, etc.), author, timestamp, text content, score, and any associated metadata.

What You'll Receive

When you query a specific item, the response includes all available data for that item. For stories, you'll receive the title, URL (if it's a link post), author, submission time, score, and the number of comments. For comments, you'll get the comment text, author, timestamp, and references to parent items and replies. This structured data makes it easy to understand the item's context within the broader Hacker News community.

Common Use Cases

Querying specific items is particularly useful when you've identified interesting content through other means—perhaps someone shared a Hacker News link, you're following up on a previous query, or you're tracking specific discussions over time. It's also valuable for analyzing comment threads, as you can retrieve individual comments and then explore their relationships to parent items and replies.

By understanding how to query items directly by their identifiers, you gain precise control over the Hacker News data you're accessing, enabling targeted research and analysis.