Understanding Story Feeds

The Hacker News MCP Server provides access to several curated story feeds that represent different views of community activity. Each feed serves a specific purpose and helps you discover content based on different criteria.

Top Stories represent submissions that have risen to prominence through community voting. These are the posts currently featured on Hacker News's front page, reflecting what the community finds most interesting or valuable right now. Top stories typically include a mix of technical articles, product launches, research papers, and thought-provoking discussions.

New Stories show the most recent submissions in chronological order, regardless of votes or engagement. This feed is ideal when you want to catch emerging discussions early, monitor specific topics as they're posted, or see the full breadth of content being submitted to the platform.

Best Stories highlight submissions that have demonstrated sustained value and engagement over time. This feed uses Hacker News's ranking algorithm to identify posts with particularly strong community reception, making it excellent for discovering high-quality content you might have missed.

Retrieving Stories

Once your MCP server is configured, retrieving story feeds is straightforward through natural language requests to your AI assistant. You can ask questions like:

• "What are the current top stories on Hacker News?"
• "Show me the latest new submissions"
• "What are today's best stories?"

The server returns structured data for each story, including the title, URL, author, submission time, current score, and the number of comments. This information gives you a complete picture of each submission without needing to visit the website directly.

Working with Story Data

Story data can be used immediately for various purposes. You might scan titles and URLs to identify relevant articles, check scores to gauge community interest, or note comment counts to find active discussions. The submission time helps you understand how quickly stories are gaining traction.

For deeper analysis, you can retrieve the full comment threads associated with any story by referencing its unique identifier. This allows you to move seamlessly from browsing story feeds to exploring the community discussions happening around specific submissions.

The real-time nature of the server means you're always working with current data, making it reliable for monitoring purposes or staying informed about breaking news in the technology sector.