Hacker News MCP Server

The Hacker News MCP Server bridges the gap between AI assistants and one of the most influential tech forums. By exposing Hacker News data through the Model Context Protocol, it enables assistants like Claude to fetch real‑time stories, comments, user profiles, and search results without leaving the chat. This removes the need for developers to build custom wrappers around the official Hacker News API or Algolia’s search service, saving time and ensuring consistent data access across multiple LLM clients.

At its core, the server offers a suite of tools that mirror common Hacker News interactions. Developers can retrieve top, new, best, ask, show, or job stories in bulk, pull a single story along with its threaded comments, and even walk the entire comment tree of a post. Search capabilities are powered by Algolia’s HN Search API, allowing precise queries over both stories and comments with pagination support. User-centric tools provide profile details—including karma, account age, and bio—as well as a list of all submissions made by a particular username. All these actions are expressed through simple, declarative tool calls that fit naturally into the MCP workflow.

The value for AI‑centric development lies in the server’s real‑time data delivery and its seamless integration with existing MCP clients. A developer can prompt an assistant to “show me the latest top stories about cloud security” and receive a curated list instantly, or ask for “the comment tree of story 1234567” and get a structured hierarchy that the assistant can parse or display. Because every tool returns JSON, downstream processes—such as summarization, sentiment analysis, or trend detection—can consume the data directly without additional parsing layers.

Real‑world use cases abound: a product manager can ask an assistant to surface the most upvoted discussions on new API features; a content creator can pull the latest ask‑HN threads to generate topic ideas; an educator could retrieve user profiles of notable contributors for case studies. In research, analysts can query historical comment trees to study discourse patterns over time. The server’s lightweight API also means it can be embedded in internal tooling, allowing teams to build custom dashboards that respond to natural language queries.

What sets this MCP server apart is its unified interface and the fact that it leverages both Hacker News’s official endpoints and Algolia’s search engine. This dual approach ensures comprehensive coverage—raw data for accuracy, enriched search for relevance—while keeping latency low. The server’s modular design also means new features (e.g., filtering by vote count or comment depth) can be added without breaking existing clients. For developers who already rely on MCP, the Hacker News server provides a plug‑and‑play gateway to one of the most vibrant knowledge bases in tech, turning conversational AI into a powerful research and monitoring tool.