Hacker News MCP Server

Overview

The MCP Server for Hacker News provides a lightweight, standardized interface that lets AI assistants retrieve real‑time data from the Hacker News API. By exposing a small set of well‑defined resources—top stories, best stories, new stories, individual story details, and user profiles—the server turns the popular news aggregation site into a first‑class data source for conversational agents. This eliminates the need for developers to write custom HTTP wrappers or handle authentication, allowing AI models to ask questions like “What are the current top stories on Hacker News?” or “Show me the profile of user .” and receive structured responses instantly.

For developers building AI‑powered applications, the server offers several key advantages. First, it abstracts away the intricacies of the Hacker News REST endpoints, presenting a clean MCP resource schema that can be consumed directly by any MCP‑compatible client. Second, the server returns data in JSON objects that map closely to the underlying Hacker News entities—stories with titles, URLs, scores, and comments; users with karma and activity stats—making it easy to surface this information in UI components or feed into downstream analytics pipelines. Third, the server’s resource list is intentionally minimal yet sufficient for most use cases: developers can quickly retrieve lists of IDs and then fetch detailed objects on demand, mirroring the pagination patterns of the original API.

Typical use cases include building a knowledge‑base assistant that keeps up with trending tech discussions, creating a dashboard for data scientists to monitor community sentiment, or integrating Hacker News content into a content‑curation workflow. Because the server follows MCP conventions, it can be plugged into existing tools such as Claude Desktop with a single configuration entry. Once connected, the AI assistant can invoke any resource via simple JSON messages, and the server handles network calls, caching, and error translation automatically.

In addition to its straightforward API surface, the server brings unique benefits: it supports resource‑level sampling, allowing the assistant to retrieve a limited number of items when only a preview is needed, and it can be extended with custom prompts or tools if the developer wishes to add domain‑specific logic (e.g., filtering stories by tag). The result is a seamless, low‑friction bridge between conversational AI and the dynamic content of Hacker News, empowering developers to deliver richer, data‑driven experiences without writing boilerplate code.