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Understanding Hacker News Story Feeds: Top, New, and Best Stories
What Are Story Feeds?
The Hacker News MCP server provides access to three primary story feeds, each serving a distinct purpose for different use cases. Understanding the differences between these feeds will help you retrieve the most relevant content for your needs.
Top Stories
Top stories represent the current front page of Hacker News—the submissions that have gained the most traction through community voting and engagement. These are stories that have risen through the ranking algorithm, which considers factors like upvotes, time since submission, and comment activity.
When you request top stories, you'll receive the articles and discussions that are currently capturing the community's attention. This feed is ideal when you want to understand what the tech community considers important right now, monitor breaking news in technology, or identify trending topics. The top stories feed typically contains between 30-50 stories and updates dynamically as voting patterns change throughout the day.
Best use cases for top stories:
- Getting a snapshot of current tech news and discussions
- Identifying what's trending in the technology community
- Daily monitoring of significant developments
New Stories
New stories show the most recent submissions to Hacker News in chronological order, regardless of votes or comments. This feed displays content as it arrives on the platform, giving you access to emerging discussions before they've been filtered by community voting.
The new stories feed is valuable when you need real-time awareness of submissions, want to discover content before it reaches the front page, or monitor specific topics as they appear. Since this feed includes all submissions, you'll encounter a broader range of quality and relevance compared to the curated top stories feed.
Best use cases for new stories:
- Real-time monitoring of submissions
- Early discovery of emerging topics
- Tracking mentions of specific companies or technologies as they're posted
Best Stories
Best stories represent submissions that have demonstrated sustained value over time. This feed uses Hacker News's algorithm to identify stories with high-quality engagement, meaningful discussion, and lasting relevance rather than just immediate popularity.
The best stories feed filters for content that the community has found genuinely valuable through thoughtful engagement rather than quick reactions. This makes it particularly useful for research, content curation, or identifying high-quality technical resources that have been validated by the community.
Best use cases for best stories:
- Finding high-quality technical content and resources
- Research requiring community-vetted information
- Discovering substantive discussions with lasting value
Choosing the Right Feed
Select your feed based on your goals: use top stories for current awareness, new stories for real-time monitoring, and best stories for quality-focused research and content discovery. You can query any feed through natural language requests to your AI assistant, and the server will return structured data including titles, URLs, scores, and metadata for each story.
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