Understanding Comment Threads

Comment threads on Hacker News contain some of the most valuable insights and technical discussions in the tech community. The MCP server makes accessing and navigating these conversations straightforward, allowing you to dive deep into discussions without manually browsing the website.

Accessing Comments for a Story

To access comments on any Hacker News story, you first need the story's unique identifier. Once you have a story of interest—whether from browsing top stories or new submissions—you can request its comment thread directly through your AI assistant using natural language.

Simply ask to see the comments for a specific story by referencing its title or ID. The server will retrieve the complete comment thread, providing you with structured data about each comment, including the comment text, author, timestamp, and score.

Navigating Comment Hierarchies

Hacker News comments are organized in a tree structure, where replies nest under parent comments to create threaded discussions. The server preserves this hierarchical relationship, allowing you to understand the flow of conversation.

When you retrieve a comment thread, each comment includes information about its position in the hierarchy. You can identify parent-child relationships to follow specific discussion branches. This structure is particularly useful when conversations split into multiple subtopics or when you want to track how a particular point develops through subsequent replies.

Retrieving Individual Comments

If you're interested in a specific comment rather than an entire thread, you can access individual comments directly using their unique identifiers. This is useful when you want to reference a particular insight, check for updates to a comment, or analyze a specific user's contribution without loading the entire discussion.

Exploring Deep Discussions

Some Hacker News threads contain hundreds of comments across multiple levels of nesting. When working with large threads, you can request specific branches or depth levels to focus on the most relevant portions of the conversation. This targeted approach helps you efficiently navigate extensive discussions without being overwhelmed by the full volume of comments.

Practical Tips

When exploring comment threads, pay attention to comment scores, as they indicate community agreement or appreciation. Highly-voted comments often contain expert insights or particularly valuable perspectives.

Timestamps help you understand the evolution of discussions, especially for breaking news or developing stories where early comments may differ significantly from later ones.

User information associated with each comment allows you to identify recurring contributors or subject matter experts who frequently provide valuable commentary in specific domains.