Connect AI Agents to
Instant DB
Automate workflows and connect AI agents to Instant DB. Metorial is built for developers. Handling OAuth, compliance, observability, and more.
Connect AI Agents to
Back to Instant DB overview
Understanding Different Story Feeds: Top, New, and Best Stories
What Are Story Feeds?
When you access Hacker News through this MCP server, you'll encounter three primary story feeds: Top Stories, New Stories, and Best Stories. Each feed serves a distinct purpose and presents content based on different criteria. Understanding these differences helps you find the most relevant content for your needs.
Top Stories
The Top Stories feed represents what's currently popular on Hacker News. These are submissions that have gained significant community attention through upvotes and are prominently featured on the site's front page. Stories appear in this feed based on a combination of factors including their score (number of upvotes), how recently they were submitted, and their engagement level.
When you request top stories, you're seeing what the Hacker News community considers important right now. This feed updates dynamically as new stories gain traction and older ones lose prominence. It's ideal for staying current with breaking news, trending discussions, and topics generating active debate within the tech community.
Use top stories when you want to know what's capturing attention today, monitor real-time reactions to industry events, or discover what thought leaders are discussing.
New Stories
The New Stories feed displays the most recently submitted content to Hacker News, regardless of votes or popularity. Stories appear in reverse chronological order—newest first—giving you unfiltered access to fresh submissions as they arrive.
This feed moves quickly, with new posts appearing constantly throughout the day. Stories here haven't been vetted by community voting yet, so quality and relevance vary widely. However, this feed offers unique advantages: you can discover emerging topics before they gain mainstream attention, spot breaking news immediately, and identify niche discussions that might never reach the front page.
Choose new stories when you want to be among the first to see developments, prefer browsing raw submissions, or are researching activity patterns and submission trends.
Best Stories
The Best Stories feed showcases content that has demonstrated sustained value over time. Unlike top stories, which reflect momentary popularity, best stories have maintained high engagement and positive reception. This feed considers factors beyond immediate voting to identify submissions with lasting impact.
Best stories typically include deeply technical articles, insightful analyses, and resources that remain relevant beyond their publication date. The algorithm favors content that continues generating discussion and appreciation rather than fleeting news items.
This feed works best when you're researching topics and want authoritative sources, seeking high-quality technical content, or building a reading list of substantial material.
Choosing the Right Feed
Your choice depends on your goals. For staying current, use top stories. For discovering emerging content, choose new stories. For finding substantive, enduring material, browse best stories. You can also combine feeds—perhaps monitoring new stories for specific topics while reviewing best stories for background research.
Instant DB on Metorial
The Instant DB integration lets you query and manipulate your real-time database directly through natural language, enabling you to read, write, and update data across your app's namespace and schema without leaving your development workflow.
Connect anything. Anywhere.
About Metorial
Metorial provides developers with instant access to 600+ MCP servers for building AI agents that can interact with real-world tools and services. Built on MCP, Metorial simplifies agent tool integration by offering pre-configured connections to popular platforms like Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Notion, and hundreds of other APIs. Our platform supports all major AI agent frameworks—including LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, and LangGraph—enabling developers to add tool calling capabilities to their agents in just a few lines of code. By eliminating the need for custom integration code, Metorial helps AI developers move from prototype to production faster while maintaining security and reliability. Whether you're building autonomous research agents, customer service bots, or workflow automation tools, Metorial's MCP server library provides the integrations you need to connect your agents to the real world.