Overview

When working with the Hacker News MCP Server, you'll often need to retrieve specific items by their unique identifiers. Whether you're looking up a particular story, comment, or tracking a discussion thread, querying by ID provides direct access to the exact content you need without browsing through lists or feeds.

Understanding Hacker News IDs

Every item on Hacker News—stories, comments, polls, and job postings—has a unique numeric identifier assigned when it's created. These IDs are sequential and permanent, meaning an item's ID never changes. You'll encounter these IDs in URLs (like news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678), in responses from other queries, or when someone references a specific discussion.

How to Query by ID

To retrieve a specific item, simply ask your AI assistant to fetch it using the item's ID number. For example:

• "Get Hacker News item 38749380"
• "Show me the details for story ID 38742190"
• "Fetch comment 38750123 from Hacker News"

The server will return comprehensive information about that item, including its type, content, author, timestamp, score, and related metadata.

What You'll Receive

The response varies depending on the item type:

For stories, you'll receive the title, URL (if it's a link submission), author username, submission time, current score, and the number of comments. You'll also get the list of comment IDs attached to that story.

For comments, the server returns the comment text, author, timestamp, the parent item it's responding to, and any child comments (replies). This allows you to reconstruct entire conversation threads.

For other item types like polls or jobs, you'll receive relevant fields specific to that content type.

Practical Applications

Querying by ID is particularly useful when:

• Following up on a story you discovered earlier
• Diving deep into specific comment threads from a larger discussion
• Tracking how a particular submission performs over time
• Investigating items referenced in other conversations or research

Building on ID Queries

Once you retrieve an item, you can use the IDs contained in its response to navigate further. For instance, a story response includes comment IDs, which you can then query individually to read the discussion. Similarly, comments contain parent and child IDs, letting you traverse conversation threads in any direction.

This ID-based navigation gives you precise control over what content you access, making the Hacker News MCP Server a powerful tool for targeted research and analysis.