hn-mcp-server

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Tools

Four read-only tools for accessing Hacker News data:

Tool Name	Description
hn_get_stories	Fetch stories from an HN feed (top, new, best, ask, show, jobs) with pagination.
hn_get_thread	Get an item and its comment tree as a threaded discussion with depth/count controls.
hn_get_user	Fetch a user profile with karma, about, and optionally their recent submissions.
hn_search_content	Search stories and comments via Algolia with type, author, date, and score filters.

hn_get_stories

Fetch stories from any HN feed with pagination support.

• Six feed types: top, new, best, ask, show, jobs
• Configurable count (1–100, default 30) and offset for pagination
• Returns enriched story objects with title, URL, score, author, comment count, and body text

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hn_get_thread

Retrieve an item and its full comment tree via ranked breadth-first traversal.

• Depth control (0–10, default 3) — depth 0 doubles as a single-item lookup
• Comment limit (1–200, default 50) caps total comments across all levels
• Breadth-first traversal preserves HN's ranking order
• Flat comment list with depth/parentId for tree reconstruction

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hn_get_user

Fetch a user profile with optional recent submission resolution.

• Profile includes karma, creation date, and about text (HTML stripped)
• Optionally resolves up to 50 most recent submissions into full items
• Submission resolution filters out dead/deleted items

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hn_search_content

Full-text search via the Algolia HN Search API.

• Filter by content type: story, comment, ask_hn, show_hn, front_page
• Filter by author, date range (ISO 8601), and minimum points
• Sort by relevance or date
• Pagination with page/count controls

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core:

• Declarative tool definitions — single file per tool, framework handles registration and validation
• Unified error handling across all tools
• Structured logging with request correlation
• Runs locally (stdio/HTTP) from the same codebase

HN-specific:

• Server-level instructions orientation forwarded to LLM clients on initialize — item types, ID reuse across tools, case-sensitive usernames, and field sparsity expectations
• Concurrent batch fetching with configurable parallelism for item resolution
• HTML entity decoding and tag stripping with code block and link preservation
• No API keys required — HN APIs are public

Getting Started

Public Hosted Instance

A public instance is available at https://hn.caseyjhand.com/mcp — no installation required. Point any MCP client at it via Streamable HTTP: