A lot of people on this thread wanted a true "Google Alerts" tool that notifies you when a post on HN contains a given keywords in the title. I agree, so I forked the workflow and created my own that does this: https://pipedream.com/@dylburger/google-alerts-for-hacker-ne... .
The README explains how it works in detail, but you can modify the KEYWORDS constant at the top of the Node.js code step to receive alerts for any keywords you'd like. Then, on the schedule you specify (e.g. every 30 minutes), this hits the HN API and sends you a Slack message with the story link.
Let me know if y'all have any feedback on this, happy to modify it to suit specific needs. If you know Node, you can fork and run a copy yourself and modify it however you'd like, too.
How do you know it's reliable? In my experience, Google Alerts misses a lot of mentions on HN and Reddit.
I would challenge you to try an alternative (like https://f5bot.com/) for a week. You may be surprised at how many more hits it gets over Google Alerts.
Right now, the product is in alpha, so its programming model is subject to change. As a result we expect it to serve mostly personal use cases, and hope to serve the enterprise over time.
And yes, it's free! You can run any number of cron jobs up to a frequency of once / minute [1]. You can also trigger workflows via HTTP requests [2], up to 10 QPS for free (after that, we'll rate limit you and issue 429s, but you can always reach out to us to raise that limit if you have a use case).
We think it's the easiest way to run Node.js code on a schedule or in response to HTTP requests. There's no infra to manage or other cloud resources to provision. You just write Node code.
We support a lot of first-class "destinations", like S3 [3] and a hosted data warehouse where you can send any JSON and query it using SQL, also for free [4] (we generate and update the table schema for you, based on the JSON you send). We use these destinations internally to store e.g. data from webhooks for analytics. If you need to run basic transformations on HTTP requests using Node, then send that data somewhere, it's a trivial way to do it. You can add any number of these destinations to a single workflow. We also support returning custom HTTP responses if you'd like to build out simple APIs [5].
I'd love if you found a use case for it and gave us any technical feedback you have. That's exactly what we're looking for at this stage!
The code I provided doesn't let you receive notifications when certain strings were in Hacker News article titles but you could certainly fork it and modify the code to do just that. If you do, please share the version here so we can all use it.
Also very useful are http://www.hnreplies.com for emailing when someone replies to your comment and hnrss.org which can seach for any keywords when used with your RSS reader. I recommend Inoreader.
Oh haha, thanks for replying here! Funny enough, I didn't even receive a notification for this comment, although I think it's probably unrelated to the previous instances. In this particular case, I accidentally unsubscribed (speaking of which, it would be nice if the page asked for a confirmation before unsubscribing?), but after re-subscribing and verifying, I haven't received anything, so I suspect it's a glitch there. In previous instances (which come up every several weeks/few months), some notifications seem to go missing for a day or two -- if I get a chance I might report them from now on.
The top story on HN changes around 10 - 20 times per day so it is nice to get a notification in Slack (or Discord, text, email, or your preferred method) when a new story hits #1.
My version of "Google Alerts" for Hacker News runs a cron job every five minutes that sends me a new Slack message each time a new story hits #1.
I know there’s a lot I can improve here and so would love any feedback, ideas and/or opinions.
Also pipedream looks really powerful (it looks like you're affiliated but correct me if I'm wrong). Any plans to support typescript and/or other languages?
Yes! We do plan to support other languages, but we're prioritizing other parts of the platform first, e.g. getting the developer UX right, environment separation, the ability to connect to accounts via OAuth, etc.
We've had a lot of requests for Python support, and we would love to ship support for TypeScript, as well.
I appreciate the feedback. Please let me know if you have any more!
Does anyone have an alternative that behaves closer to Google Alerts, i.e. alerts for when a website or brand is mentioned on HN? Looking for something that's also realtime :)
Not a full solution, but there's the API at https://hnstream.com/ for getting realtime updates of comments, which could be used to build a notification system.
Seconded. I have watch words setup for several keywords. I turn off lobste.rs since I feel HN is already high enough for me in the ivory tower (aka I haven't networked enough to get an in crowd lobsters invite).
"I try to answer questions about Cloudflare, or comments about the company, here when I have the time. I do the same on Twitter (and to a certain extent on Reddit). I have code that monitors HN for mentions of "Cloudflare" and emails me within a couple of minutes."
At one point, I also built a chrome extension with similar news feed functionality for a client through Gigster... (I think it was an Admin for HN). Can’t release that though.
I'm running https://mentionme.app (I guess we're somewhat competing) and when talking with users I learned that there is a common misconception with Google Alerts. I don't think it works how people think it works. It will miss mentions on social news sites, it seems it's more of a trend measuring tool than an alerting tool. Just monitor and post a random string to reddit.com/r/test to see yourself.
I was able to build the same app with a slicker UX for letting people sign up. It's here if you want to check it out: https://hnnotify-bgon9.transposit.io
You have to sign up to see the code and fork it (so you could change it to send you email or a text instead of posting to slack.) Sorry, we're working on a way to see code without authentication)
Thing I would really want is "What you missed on HN" page. It can go through my upvotes and figures out relevant stories that appeared in HN since last visit or date range/
This is actually really cool! Are you just searching for content in the description, or do you scrape the link's contents too to get your curation of content?
The README explains how it works in detail, but you can modify the KEYWORDS constant at the top of the Node.js code step to receive alerts for any keywords you'd like. Then, on the schedule you specify (e.g. every 30 minutes), this hits the HN API and sends you a Slack message with the story link.
Let me know if y'all have any feedback on this, happy to modify it to suit specific needs. If you know Node, you can fork and run a copy yourself and modify it however you'd like, too.