Overview

Every item on Hacker News—whether it's a story, comment, poll, or job posting—has a unique numeric identifier. When you need to access specific content directly rather than browsing through feeds, searching by ID provides the fastest and most precise method. This capability is particularly useful when you're tracking particular discussions, following up on previously identified content, or working with references from other sources.

Understanding Hacker News IDs

Hacker News assigns sequential IDs to all content as it's created. These IDs appear in URLs when you browse the site—for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678 refers to item 12345678. You'll encounter these IDs when someone shares a link to a specific story or comment, when you're tracking particular discussions over time, or when you're conducting research that requires revisiting specific content.

How to Search by ID

To retrieve a specific item by its ID, simply ask your AI assistant to fetch that particular Hacker News item using its numeric identifier. You can request individual stories, comments, or other content types by providing the ID number.

For example, you might say:

• "Get Hacker News item 38471928"
• "Show me the details for HN story ID 38450000"
• "Retrieve the comment with ID 38472156"

The server will return comprehensive information about that item, including its type (story, comment, poll, etc.), author, timestamp, content text, score, and any associated metadata like URLs or parent items.

What You'll Receive

When you query by ID, the response includes all available data for that item. For stories, you'll see the title, URL (if it's a link post), score, author, submission time, and the number of comments. For comments, you'll receive the comment text, author, timestamp, score, and references to parent items and any replies.

This structured data allows you to examine specific content in detail, analyze how it has been received by the community, and understand its context within larger discussions.

Practical Applications

ID-based searching is invaluable when you need to monitor specific discussions over time, checking back to see how scores have evolved or whether new comments have been added. It's also essential when working with data from external sources that reference Hacker News items by ID, or when you want to retrieve the full context around a particular comment or story that someone has mentioned.

Combined with the server's other capabilities, ID searching gives you pinpoint accuracy in accessing exactly the Hacker News content you need.