Thread

Hacker News

Retrieve one public Hacker News item with a bounded nested comment tree and explicit truncation state.

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Job: Search Hacker News
Current price: $0.0050/request
Availability: Ready to run

Tool details

About this tool

Retrieve a Hacker News story, job, poll or comment by exact numeric item ID or canonical item URL and return its nested discussion with configurable depth and comment-count limits. IDs stay strings, comment HTML becomes plain text, hierarchy and canonical links remain explicit, and dead, deleted, partial or truncated states are reported rather than silently omitted.

Inputs and outputs

Input

id_or_urlstring · required

Positive numeric HN item ID or canonical news.ycombinator.com item URL.

minLength: 1 · maxLength: 2048

max_commentsinteger · optional

Value supplied for max comments.

minimum: 1 · maximum: 200

max_depthinteger · optional

Value supplied for max depth.

minimum: 0 · maximum: 8

Output

captured_atstring

Returned captured at value.

itemobject

Returned item value.

max_depthnumber

Returned max depth value.

omitted_commentsnumber

Returned omitted comments value.

returned_commentsnumber

Returned returned comments value.

source_urlstring

Returned source url value.

total_commentsnumber

Returned total comments value.

truncatedboolean

Returned truncated value.

Example request and output

Inspect returns this reviewed example, its estimated cost and the current input schema. Run calculates the estimate for your actual input.

Request

{
  "tool_id": "hacker-news.thread",
  "input": {
    "id_or_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863",
    "max_depth": 2,
    "max_comments": 25
  }
}

Output

{
  "item": {
    "id": "8863",
    "type": "story",
    "state": "available",
    "title": "My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive",
    "author": "dhouston",
    "children": [
      {
        "id": "8865",
        "text": "oh, and a mac port is coming :)",
        "type": "comment",
        "state": "available",
        "author": "dhouston",
        "parent_id": "8863",
        "source_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8865"
      }
    ],
    "source_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863"
  },
  "max_depth": 2,
  "truncated": true,
  "source_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863",
  "captured_at": "2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z",
  "total_comments": 71,
  "omitted_comments": 46,
  "returned_comments": 25
}

Errors and limitations

not_found: Hacker News could not find that public item.Use an exact positive item ID or canonical news.ycombinator.com item URL.