Overview

When working with Hacker News content, you'll often need to retrieve specific items—whether that's a particular story, comment, or user profile. Each piece of content on Hacker News has a unique numeric identifier (ID), and the Perplexity MCP server provides straightforward methods to query these items directly.

Understanding Hacker News IDs

Every item on Hacker News—stories, comments, polls, and jobs—receives a unique identifier when created. These IDs are sequential integers that you'll encounter in URLs, API responses, and community discussions. For example, a story URL like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678 indicates that item's ID is 12345678.

Querying Individual Items

To retrieve a specific item by its ID, simply ask your AI assistant to fetch that item from Hacker News. You might phrase your request as:

• "Get Hacker News item 12345678"
• "Show me details for HN story ID 12345678"
• "Retrieve the comment with ID 12345678"

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

What You'll Receive

When querying a story, you'll receive the title, URL (if external), submission time, score, author username, and the number of comments. For comments, you'll get the comment text, author, timestamp, and references to parent items and replies. User profiles include karma scores, account creation dates, biographical information, and submission history.

Practical Applications

Querying by ID is particularly useful when following up on specific content. If you've saved interesting discussion IDs, you can check back later to see how scores or comment counts have evolved. When someone references a particular Hacker News item in conversation or another platform, you can quickly retrieve full details without manually navigating the website.

You can also traverse comment threads by starting with a story ID, examining its comments, and then querying specific comment IDs to explore nested discussions. This enables deep-dive analysis of conversations around technical topics.

Tips for Effective Querying

Keep track of interesting item IDs for future reference. Since IDs are permanent and items rarely disappear, they serve as reliable bookmarks to valuable content. When analyzing multiple related items, query them individually to gather complete data rather than relying on summary lists that might omit important details.