Automate workflows and connect AI agents to Vercel. Metorial is built for developers. Handling OAuth, compliance, observability, and more.
Hacker News comment threads contain some of the most valuable insights and technical discussions on the internet. With the Hacker News MCP Server, you can access and navigate these conversations directly through your AI assistant, making it easy to extract knowledge from community discussions.
To view comments on any Hacker News story, you'll first need the story's identifier. You can obtain this by browsing stories through the server (such as top or new stories), which return item IDs along with story details. Once you have a story ID, simply ask your assistant to retrieve the comments for that specific item.
The server returns comment data in a structured format, including the comment text, author, timestamp, score, and importantly, the relationships between comments. Each comment contains information about its parent comment and any child comments, allowing you to understand the conversation hierarchy.
Hacker News comments are organized as trees, where replies nest under the comments they respond to. When you retrieve a comment thread, you'll receive data showing these parent-child relationships. Top-level comments respond directly to the story, while nested replies form deeper discussion branches.
To navigate these trees effectively, you can request specific comments by their individual IDs. This is particularly useful when you want to focus on a specific conversation branch without processing the entire thread. Ask your assistant to retrieve a particular comment, and you'll receive that comment along with information about its position in the thread hierarchy.
When examining individual comments, you may want to understand the full context of the discussion. Since each comment includes its parent ID, you can trace conversations backward to see what prompted a particular response. Similarly, by following child comment IDs, you can explore how a discussion evolved over time.
This bidirectional navigation allows you to understand not just what people said, but how ideas developed through back-and-forth exchanges, which is often where the most valuable insights emerge.
For active stories with hundreds of comments, start by requesting the main story item to see top-level comments first, then dive deeper into specific threads that seem relevant. When researching specific topics, you can ask your assistant to summarize comment themes or identify particularly insightful contributions based on scores and content.
Remember that comment scores reflect community agreement and can help you identify which responses the Hacker News community found most valuable or insightful.
The Vercel integration lets you deploy, manage, and monitor your projects directly from your development environment, enabling you to check deployment status, view logs, and trigger new builds without leaving your workflow.
Let's take your AI-powered applications to the next level, together.
Metorial provides developers with instant access to 600+ MCP servers for building AI agents that can interact with real-world tools and services. Built on MCP, Metorial simplifies agent tool integration by offering pre-configured connections to popular platforms like Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Notion, and hundreds of other APIs. Our platform supports all major AI agent frameworks—including LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, and LangGraph—enabling developers to add tool calling capabilities to their agents in just a few lines of code. By eliminating the need for custom integration code, Metorial helps AI developers move from prototype to production faster while maintaining security and reliability. Whether you're building autonomous research agents, customer service bots, or workflow automation tools, Metorial's MCP server library provides the integrations you need to connect your agents to the real world.