A slack bot that tracks when you make it to the front page of Hacker News; developed with 💖 @ Hack Club
⚠️ Highly optionated / mad teenager rants at computer warning - From "I wish I had this" to "now we all do"
HN Alerts watches Hacker News for you and anyone else that chooses to trust your instructions to run /hn-alerts-link, notifying you through Slack when:
- Your posts appear on the front page (top 30)
- Your posts climb the rankings
- Your posts reach the coveted #1 position 🏆
- Any significant changes to your post's performance
The dashboard provides:
- Real-time position tracking with historical graphs
- Performance metrics (peak position, time on front page, comment activity)
- Leaderboard of all tracked stories
- Detailed analytics for each post's journey
- An excellent caching mechanism (this took me so very long to implement)
You can launch the bot locally with bun
bun install
bun devyou will also need to launch an ngrok tunnel and update your dev slack manifest to point to the ngrok tunnel
bun ngrokyou also need to create a .env file with the following keys
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN="xoxb-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx"
SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET="xxxxx"
SLACK_CHANNEL="C08KX2YNN87"
NODE_ENV="dev"
SENTRY_DSN="https://xxxxxx@xxxxxx.ingest.us.sentry.io/xxxx"Don't forget to initialize your database:
bun db:push/hn-alerts-link your_username- Link your Hacker News account/hn-alerts-link verify- Verify your Hacker News account (post the challenge code to your HN profile)/hn-alerts-link unlink- Remove your linked account/hn-alerts-link help- Show command help
The code is licensed under MIT! That means MIT allows for free use, modification, and distribution of the software, requiring only that the original copyright notice and disclaimer are included in copies.
© 2025-present Kieran Klukas
