Overview

When you interact with Hacker News through this MCP server, you'll encounter various data structures that represent different types of content. Understanding these fields will help you make sense of the information returned and enable you to ask more effective questions of your AI assistant.

Core Item Types

Hacker News organizes all content as "items," each with a unique identifier. Items can be stories, comments, jobs, polls, or poll options. Each item type shares some common fields while having specific attributes relevant to its purpose.

Common Fields

Every item you retrieve includes several standard fields:

• id: A unique numerical identifier for the item
• type: Indicates whether the item is a "story," "comment," "job," "poll," or "pollopt"
• by: The username of the item's author
• time: A Unix timestamp indicating when the item was created
• dead: A boolean flag indicating if the item has been killed by moderators
• deleted: Shows if the item has been deleted

Story Fields

Stories represent submitted links or text posts and contain additional fields:

• title: The headline of the submission
• url: The link destination (for link posts; text posts use the Hacker News discussion URL)
• score: The current points/upvotes the story has received
• descendants: Total count of comments in the discussion tree
• kids: An array of comment IDs that are direct replies to the story

Understanding the score and descendants helps you identify popular or active discussions worth exploring further.

Comment Fields

Comments are responses to stories or other comments:

• parent: The ID of the parent item (either a story or another comment)
• text: The HTML content of the comment
• kids: An array of child comment IDs representing replies

Comments form tree structures, where each comment can have multiple replies. The kids array lets you traverse these conversation threads.

User Profile Fields

When retrieving user information, you'll see:

• id: The username
• created: Account creation timestamp
• karma: Total points accumulated from upvotes
• about: User's biographical information
• submitted: An array of IDs for all items the user has submitted

Practical Tips

When working with this data, remember that not all fields appear on every item. Deleted comments may have empty text fields, and not every story generates discussion (resulting in zero descendants). The server returns structured data that your AI assistant can interpret, so you can ask questions like "What are the top-voted comments?" or "Show me stories from the past week with over 100 points" without worrying about the underlying field names.