Hacker News Mention Monitor
Sweeps Hacker News every hour for your product, company, and competitors, reads the comments before judging anything, and pings Slack only when a thread genuinely needs you today.
Hacker News is where a lot of founders find out their product was discussed, usually a week after the thread died. This agent sweeps every hour against the exact terms you name, reads the comments before it judges anything, and only interrupts you when a thread clears the policy you wrote. Everything else waits for the roundup, so a front page story reaches you within the hour and a passing mention does not reach you at all.
## What people use it for
- **Answer while the thread is live** - A launch or a comparison thread reaches you inside the hour, when a founder reply still changes what the next thousand readers take away from it.
- **See criticism before customers do** - Security claims and complaint threads are pushed to the top of the message with a plain note that a person is needed, so you are not the last to know.
- **Watch competitors in the same pass** - Put competitor names in the watch list and every migration question and comparison thread lands next to your own mentions, at no extra effort.
- **No more false alarms** - Name collisions and accidental word matches are dropped before anything is sent, so a ping in your channel always means something real happened.
## Before you fork
**What do I need connected before this runs?**
A Slack workspace with the channel you want pings in. Hacker News search is public, so there is nothing to authenticate on that side. Setup asks you for the watch terms and the ping policy, and the first Test Run shows you exactly what a sweep produces before it goes live.
**Will it ever post on Hacker News?**
No. It searches, fetches items, and reads comments, and that is all. Its instructions say never to post, comment, reply, upvote, or flag, and no Hacker News write operation exists in this template. Whether you respond to a thread stays entirely a human decision.
**Is running every hour noisy or expensive?**
Most sweeps find nothing and send nothing, which is the intended result rather than a fault. Cost is one agent run per hour, and the pricier ones are the hours where it reads a full comment thread. If your name is a common word, tighten the watch terms first, then move the schedule to every three hours.
