35 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 85.3 ms ] thread
This was made for my own and a friend use, and we found it useful, maybe others will find it useful too.
This looks nice ! i was missing such thing to search for hacker news mentions of our company.
Have been using https://www.hnwatcher.com/ for more than 3 years. Love it.
Another vote for HN watcher. Great little service.
Just registered. I seem to be able to add keywords, but can't find a way to remove keywords or edit the frequency of notifications. I've tried disabling uMatrix for the site, but that doesn't seem to help. Is it just some weird config with my browser or is that the way it's meant to be?
Cool. Is there a blog post somewhere that shows how it works internally? I'm curious if there's some formal named entity recognition, or more basic string matching. Would it work well, for example, if you had a brand name that was also a common term?
Nope there is no fancy entity recognition going on here at the moment, though that would be cool. It's a simple regex of the form

    '\bterm\b'
or in wildcard cases

    '\bterm.*\b
Free product idea: Same general concept but applied to the content of sites that make the front page.

In your Bitcoin example, one would be notified if the displayed content of an article on the front page (or say top N, or greater than M points, ...) includes the word "Bitcoin".

Bonus points if you can do complex or negative matches. Ex: +database -mongodb

That's an awesome idea - I'll add it to the todo list.
Would be great if we could select source (eg. not have Reddit)
Added, you can use -source:reddit now.
Do not wanna be that guy, but you can do that with Zapier and way more https://zapier.com/zapbook/zaps/675/post-message-slack-when-...

We (tyk.io) use Slack notifications with Zapier for various searches on HN, Reddit, Twitter, Stackoverflow or even Google Alerts (the last one use built-in Slack `/feed` feature).

Not sure how to interpret their pricing plan, but it seems that in Zapier this feature costs money.
(comment deleted)
Actually Zapier was the reason I made Little Birdie! They had a HN and Reddit integration that didn't work at all and that motivated me to make my own solution, also the $600/year was a bit too much for personal use.
You do not need to pay for a Zapier account to do something as simple as HN -> Slack unless you have hundreds of HN mentions a month.
Haha, yeah -- our (Zapier) reddit integration isn't used too much so it wasn't at the top of our list of improvements. I fixed it a few weeks ago since I too was tired of it not working -- I still run dogetipbot over on reddit so I know a bit about breaking (and fixing) reddit bots. ;)
can you put at least a contact email on that page? looks shady although very useful service (using it already). What are your future plans for it?
F5Bot[1] is a free alternative that sends an email instead.

[1] https://f5bot.com

For just looking at titles on the front page, here's a one-liner in Powershell that scrapes every 60 seconds, and emails you:

While ($True) {If ((iwr https://news.ycombinator.com).content.split('", ') | select-string "YourBrand") {Send-MailMessage -from i@i.com -to example@example.com -server MySmtpServer.example.com -subject "YourBrand was mentioned on the front page of HN!"}; Sleep 60}

Does your one-liner continue to send the same email every 60 seconds while "YourBrand" is on the front page?
Yes, you may want to disable it when your brand hits the front page.
There's also https://notify.ly/ which includes "dozens of sources, like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Blogs, News, Medium & Product Hunt."
Just to be clear, the bot doesn't get full read access to all channels, right? It can just respond back when called or message a pre-setup person or channel?
It requires no read permissions at all to the channels. It receives commands eg /littlebirdie help - and posts to a channel of your choice via webhook.
That was my first exposure to webhooks was slack, I see it in a few places now that triangle circle-corner logo.

I don't know how often the front page of Hacker news is updated but you could build this yourself.

CRON > PHP > CURL > HTMLDOMScraper > Slack webhook

I had everything else except the CRON part, I had trouble trying to run that.

note: the CRON thing for me, I tried Ubuntu and Debian, I don't know I couldn't get it to work. I couldn't get a simple php script to execute on the timed interval.

So a dumb solution would be to use a setTimeout poll with JavaScript and call the AJAX request to the PHP script which then runs everything else.

(comment deleted)
I love this kind of stuff. Super precise side project that fills a need and is fun to build.

Slightly related and clearly shameless plug: you could build this from scratch in about 2 minutes using my our new (or about 30 seconds if you fork an existing one). If you're interested email automation@jofarnold.com for a developer account. I'd very much like to hear your feedback.

Obviously not as targeted as OP but still cool :)