Understanding Item IDs

Every piece of content on Hacker News—whether it's a story, comment, poll, or job posting—has a unique numeric identifier called an item ID. These IDs are assigned sequentially as content is created, and they serve as the primary way to reference specific items within the Hacker News system. When you want to retrieve detailed information about a particular piece of content, querying by item ID is the most direct and efficient approach.

How to Query Items by ID

To retrieve a specific item from Hacker News through the MCP server, you can simply ask your AI assistant to fetch the item using its unique identifier. For example, you might say "Get Hacker News item 8863" or "Show me details for HN item 40000000." The server will retrieve the complete data for that item, including all relevant metadata.

Item IDs can be found in several ways: they appear in the URL when you're browsing Hacker News (for example, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345), they're included in the response data when you retrieve story lists, and they're referenced within comment threads as parent and child relationships.

What Information You'll Receive

When you query an item by ID, the server returns structured data that varies depending on the item type. For stories, you'll receive the title, URL (if it's a link post), author username, submission time, score, and the number of comments. For comments, you'll get the comment text, author, timestamp, and references to parent items and any replies.

This detailed information allows you to understand not just the content itself, but also its context within the Hacker News community—how it's been received, who created it, and how it fits into larger conversations.

Practical Applications

Querying specific items by ID is particularly useful when you need to follow up on content you've previously discovered. If you retrieved a list of top stories earlier and want to dive deeper into one particular submission, you can use its item ID to get the full details and access its comment thread.

This approach is also valuable for tracking specific discussions over time. By saving item IDs of interest, you can periodically check back to see how scores have changed, read new comments that have been added, or monitor ongoing conversations about topics relevant to your work.

Tips for Effective Querying

When working with item IDs, remember that they're permanent identifiers—an item's ID never changes. This makes them reliable references for bookmarking, sharing, or building automated monitoring systems. However, not all item IDs correspond to publicly visible content, as some items may have been deleted or flagged by moderators, so occasional "not found" responses are normal.