What is the Data Structure?

When you retrieve stories and comments from Hacker News through the MCP server, the data arrives in a structured format that follows the official Hacker News API schema. Understanding this structure helps you make sense of the information and effectively work with the content.

Story Data Fields

Each story object contains several key pieces of information. The id field provides a unique identifier for the story, which you'll use when referencing specific posts or retrieving their comments. The title contains the submission's headline, while the url field (when present) links to the external content being discussed.

Stories also include engagement metrics: the score represents upvotes from the community, indicating popularity and perceived value. The by field identifies the username of the person who submitted the story. Time information appears in the time field as a Unix timestamp, showing when the story was posted.

The descendants field tells you the total number of comments in the discussion thread, giving you a quick sense of how much conversation the story has generated. For text posts without external URLs, the text field contains the actual content written by the submitter.

Comment Data Structure

Comments follow a similar but slightly different structure. Like stories, each comment has an id and by field for identification and attribution. The text field contains the actual comment content, formatted in Hacker News's markup style.

The hierarchical nature of discussions is captured through the parent field, which references the id of the comment or story being replied to. The kids array contains ids of direct replies, allowing you to traverse the entire conversation tree. This structure enables you to reconstruct threaded discussions and understand the flow of conversation.

Comments also include time stamps and can be marked as deleted or dead if they've been removed or flagged by the community.

Working With the Data

When you request stories through the server, you'll typically receive arrays of these objects. Top stories come as a list ordered by current ranking, while individual story requests return single objects with all available fields populated.

For comment threads, you'll often start with a story object and then recursively fetch its kids to build out the full discussion. The server handles the API complexity, but understanding this parent-child relationship helps you navigate conversations effectively.

The consistent structure across all items makes it straightforward to extract specific information, whether you're analyzing trends, monitoring discussions, or researching specific topics within the Hacker News community.