Understanding User Profiles

The Hacker News MCP Server provides comprehensive access to user profile information, allowing you to explore the history and activity of any member of the Hacker News community. Each user profile contains valuable data including their karma score, account creation date, biographical information, and complete activity history spanning all their submissions and comments.

To query a user profile, simply ask your AI assistant about a specific Hacker News user by their username. For example, you might request "Show me the profile for user pg" or "Get information about user tptacek." The server will retrieve the user's public profile data and present it in a structured, easy-to-read format.

Accessing Activity History

One of the most powerful features of user profile queries is access to complete activity history. This includes:

Submissions: View all stories and links a user has submitted to Hacker News, including their titles, URLs, scores, and submission dates. This helps you understand what topics interest a particular user and what content they've shared with the community.

Comments: Access the complete commenting history for any user. This reveals their areas of expertise, communication style, and the discussions they participate in. Comments are often where the most valuable technical insights emerge.

Karma and Reputation: Each profile displays the user's karma score, which reflects their contributions to the community over time. Higher karma typically indicates active, valued participation.

Practical Applications

User profile queries are particularly useful for several scenarios:

Identifying Experts: When researching a technical topic, you can examine the profiles of users who frequently comment on related discussions to identify subject matter experts.

Research and Verification: Before engaging with claims or statements, check the commenter's history to understand their background and credibility in specific domains.

Community Analysis: Track how specific users engage with the community over time, understanding their interests and contribution patterns.

Best Practices

When querying user profiles, remember that all data is public information already available on Hacker News. Be respectful of privacy and use this feature for legitimate research, analysis, and community understanding purposes.

For most effective results, combine user profile queries with story and comment retrieval. For instance, after finding an insightful comment, explore the commenter's profile to discover other valuable contributions they've made to the community.