What is Story Data on Hacker News?

When you retrieve stories through the Hacker News MCP Server, you're accessing structured data objects that represent individual submissions to Hacker News. Each story contains multiple metadata fields that describe the submission's content, engagement metrics, and context within the community. Understanding this data structure helps you extract meaningful insights and make informed decisions about which content to explore further.

Core Story Metadata Fields

Every story retrieved from Hacker News includes several essential metadata components:

Unique Identifier: Each story has a numeric ID that serves as its permanent reference within the Hacker News system. You'll use this identifier when requesting comments, referencing specific submissions, or building links to the original discussion.

Title and URL: The story title represents how the submitter chose to present the content, while the URL points to the external resource being discussed. Some submissions are "Ask HN" or "Show HN" posts without external URLs—these are text-based discussions hosted directly on Hacker News.

Author Information: The by field indicates which Hacker News user submitted the story. This metadata connects submissions to user profiles, enabling you to track contributions from specific community members or identify prolific contributors.

Timestamps: Stories include submission time data, typically represented as Unix timestamps. This temporal information helps you understand when content was posted, track how quickly stories gain traction, or filter submissions by recency.

Engagement Metrics: The score reflects community votes, indicating how many users found the submission valuable. Higher scores generally correlate with greater visibility and community interest. The descendants count tells you how many total comments exist in the discussion thread, signaling the depth of community engagement.

Understanding Story Types

Hacker News categorizes submissions into different types that affect how data is structured:

Standard stories link to external content and include all typical metadata fields. Ask HN posts are questions posed to the community and contain text content instead of external URLs. Show HN submissions showcase projects or creations and may include both URLs and supplementary text descriptions. Recognizing these distinctions helps you interpret the data correctly and set appropriate expectations for what information will be available.

Working with Story Collections

When you request story feeds like "top stories" or "new stories," you receive arrays of story IDs rather than complete story objects. This design reflects Hacker News API architecture—you'll typically make follow-up requests for detailed information about specific stories that interest you. This two-step process gives you control over data volume and request efficiency, allowing you to selectively deep-dive into submissions based on initial filtering criteria.

Practical Applications

Understanding story metadata enables sophisticated analysis and filtering. You can identify high-engagement discussions by examining score and comment counts, track submission timing patterns to optimize your own content sharing, or follow specific authors whose perspectives you value. The structured nature of this data makes it ideal for programmatic analysis, trend identification, and automated monitoring workflows.