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.
Watch it work before it's live
Run a staged conversation — no account needed. The agent handles it for real while a simulated world answers its tool calls; nothing touches real accounts, and nothing is actually sent.
Hourly sweep, Tuesday 14:00
The 14:00 tick fires. A Show HN posted 40 minutes ago is at 168 points and 74 comments, sitting fourth on the front page. The top comment, from user tkachenko, asks how self hosting compares with the incumbent, two people report that the docs link returns a 404, and a competitor's founder has replied twice in the thread.
Set up in minutes
Using this template drops you into a guided setup. It asks exactly this, nothing else:
Connect Hacker News
One sign-in. The agent acts through your account, scoped to what this template uses.
Connect Slack
One sign-in. The agent acts through your account, scoped to what this template uses.
Watch terms
Every term worth watching, in your own words: your product and company names, your domain, your founders' Hacker News handles, and the competitors you want to hear about. The agent searches exactly these, so include the spellings and misspellings people actually type.
Ping policy
What earns an immediate Slack ping versus a line in tomorrow's roundup, for example a front page story or a complaint thread pings while a passing mention waits, plus the channel and the hours you are happy to be interrupted in.
Choose which agent runs it
NoClick's built-in models work out of the box — or bring Claude Code, Codex, and other coding agents on your own subscription.
Watch it handle a test run
A staged conversation against a simulated world — then it’s live.
About this agent
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.
Run it with your coding agent
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Put Hacker News Mention Monitor to work
Free to start. Guided setup, a test run against staged conversations, and it's live.