Understanding Comment Threads

Comment threads on Hacker News often contain discussions as valuable as the stories themselves. The Hacker News MCP Server makes it simple to access and navigate these conversations through natural language requests to your AI assistant, without needing to manually browse the site or write custom code.

Accessing Individual Comments

To retrieve a specific comment, you need its unique item ID. Simply ask your AI assistant to fetch a comment by its ID, and the server will return structured information including the comment text, author, timestamp, score, and references to parent items and replies.

For example, you might say: "Get me the comment with ID 12345678" or "Show me the details of comment 98765432." The server handles the API call and presents the comment data in an easily readable format.

Exploring Comment Trees

Comments on Hacker News are organized hierarchically, with replies nested under parent comments. When you access a comment, you'll see references to its children (replies) and parent (the comment or story it responds to).

To navigate a thread, you can request a parent comment and then progressively explore its replies. Ask your assistant to "show me the replies to this comment" or "get the child comments," and the server will retrieve the nested discussion. This allows you to traverse entire conversation trees, understanding how discussions develop and branch.

Accessing Story Discussions

Every story on Hacker News can have an associated comment thread. To access a story's full discussion, first retrieve the story itself, which includes a reference to its comment IDs. You can then ask your assistant to "show me the comments on this story" or "retrieve the discussion for story ID 12345."

The server will fetch the top-level comments, and from there you can drill down into specific conversation threads that interest you.

Practical Navigation Tips

When exploring lengthy discussions, start by retrieving the story and its immediate comments. Identify threads of interest based on scores, authors, or content, then dive deeper into those specific branches rather than trying to load entire trees at once.

Comment timestamps and scores help you identify the most valuable contributions. Recent comments show current perspectives, while highly-scored comments often contain particularly insightful analysis or expert knowledge.

Making the Most of Comment Data

Use comment threads to understand community sentiment, gather technical insights, or identify expert opinions on specific topics. The structured data returned by the server makes it easy to analyze discussion patterns, track how conversations evolve, or monitor responses to particular subjects over time.