Hacker News MCP Server

The Hacker News MCP Server turns the public Hacker News API into a first‑class tool set that AI assistants can invoke directly from their conversation context. It solves the common developer pain of having to write custom HTTP clients, parse JSON, and manage pagination every time a user wants real‑time news or user activity from the platform. By exposing a small, well‑defined set of tools—, , , and —the server lets assistants retrieve fresh content, dive into comment threads, search for relevant discussions, or pull a user’s profile in a single, declarative call. This eliminates boilerplate and keeps the assistant’s prompt logic clean.

The server is valuable for developers building conversational agents that need up‑to‑date industry chatter, community sentiment, or user engagement metrics. Because Hacker News is a hub for tech founders, researchers, and developers, the ability to surface current stories or track how a particular user is contributing becomes an instant enrichment point for product recommendations, trend analysis, or personalized news feeds. The tools return structured data that can be rendered as tables, summaries, or embedded links, allowing assistants to present information in a conversationally natural way.

Key capabilities include:

• Top‑story retrieval: Quickly fetch the latest or most popular posts in categories like top, new, ask_hn, and show_hn.
• Story detail extraction: Access all comments, author information, and metadata for a specific post, enabling deeper context or sentiment extraction.
• Search by keyword: Find stories matching a user’s query, useful for trend spotting or topic discovery.
• User profile lookup: Pull a Hacker News user’s karma, activity history, and recent submissions to gauge influence or expertise.

Typical use cases span from a chatbot that surfaces the day’s hottest AI discussion to an internal tool that monitors competitor activity on Hacker News. In research settings, the server can feed a language model with real‑time discourse data for sentiment or topic modeling. For product managers, it can surface user feedback loops by pulling comment threads around feature releases.

Integration into AI workflows is straightforward: the MCP server registers itself with any client that supports Model Context Protocol, such as Claude Desktop or other MCP‑enabled assistants. Once registered, the assistant can reference the tools in its prompts, and the server handles the HTTP requests, data normalization, and response formatting automatically. This tight coupling means developers can focus on crafting higher‑level conversational logic rather than wrestling with API quirks.

What sets this MCP apart is its focused, domain‑specific tooling coupled with an open, standards‑based protocol. It offers a ready‑to‑use bridge to one of the most influential tech communities without requiring custom SDKs, making it a powerful addition for any developer looking to enrich AI conversations with real‑world Hacker News content.