Show HN: I Built a “Google Alerts” for Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I Built a “Google Alerts” for Hacker News

pipedream.com

151 pointsmarcxmiller54 comments

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.

I just use Google Alerts itself and scope the URL, for example site:https://news.ycombinator.com "Apple Watch” or site:https://news.ycombinator.com tennis

I didn't realize that worked! Google Alerts is awesome.

do you get notified reliably? I always found out Google Alerts don't fire as often as they should

I do. I have each set to fire “as-it-happens,” but it’ll often be a few hours before it appears in my email.

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.

Perhaps you should share that you own/operate f5bot

Of course. It's not a secret.

This is the first I've heard of Pipedream. What's the use case for it? Personal? Enterprise?

Looking through the documentation, apparently it's [1] free to use!...

[1] https://docs.pipedream.com/pricing/

Hi there, Dylan, a Pipedream founder here.

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!

dylan [at] pipedream [dot] com

[1] https://docs.pipedream.com/cron/ [2] https://docs.pipedream.com/notebook/sources/#webhook-sources [3] https://docs.pipedream.com/notebook/destinations/s3/ [4] https://docs.pipedream.com/notebook/sql/ [5] https://docs.pipedream.com/notebook/sources/#http-responses

I really like it. I'm a node dev, I immediately understood what it does. Feels good.

Can you let me resize the columns? I had to zoom out to 80% to see what was going on.

That's great to hear! I really appreciate the feedback.

Which columns would you like to resize? The event inspector on the left, code steps, or all of the above?

Here's what it looks like at 100%: https://imgur.com/a/OgFAtIV

Oh wow, that's definitely a bug. Thanks for the screenshot!

When I saw the title, I imagined that this was a service that let you receive notifications when certain strings were in Hacker News article titles.

Right - this is more parallel to the service offered by Google Alerts.

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.

TBH this would be a good thing for you, as the developer, to do - "we added 5 lines of code and now it searches for a specific title" etc.

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.

Does hnreplies stop working randomly for other folks too? For me I sometimes don't get any notifications for replies.

It's always seemed reliable (and worked for me this time), but I'm not sure I would notice outages.

Nobody's reported any missed notifications to me in about a year.

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.

there is also https://f5bot.com/ which allows you to monitor certain keywords on HN, Reddit and Lobsters. I find it quite useful.

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.

On the chance you hadn't seen it, I must mention this aggregator[0] since it addresses the issue you are facing down with your alerts except async.

[0] https://hckrnews.com/

Thanks for sharing.

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?

Hi, this is Dylan, a Pipedream founder.

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 :)

I use F5bot and it’s great

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'm building a service that lets you subscribe to feeds and optionally apply filters. If you used hnrss with it you could probably achieve your goals?

I recall Cloudflare CTO, jgrahamc, mention he uses / built exactly what you ask for [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19486562

"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."

Hacker News is included in my companies website:

https://lettergram.net

And

https://projectpiglet.com

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.

Check out this workflow: https://pipedream.com/@dylburger/google-alerts-for-hacker-ne... . Just follow the instructions in the README, changing your KEYWORDS to the set of keywords you'd like to receive notifications for.

You can run the cron job up to once a minute for free, so it's pretty close to realtime :) .

What would gain with realtime? Genuine question.

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.

We're not quite real-time but this is in our wheelhouse https://www.civicfeed.com/

I think it already exists for quite a while: https://www.hnwatcher.com

It seems like their TLS key expired but I've been getting regular emails about topics that I care about posted to HN.

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.

Google account locked.

Pretty cool.

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 can see the app code here: https://console.transposit.com/t/mooreds/hnnotify/code/op/ge...

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)

We made a similar service called Porter[1] that people could subscribed to HN items related to their GitHub starred repos with digest email.

[1] https://porter.io

I find quite a few alert(s) to be hit/miss (even Google alerts @ times), always good to have a backup search so for certain keywords I have a page + they just link out to Algolia ... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

Alternative I use is hnwatcher. No complaonts about it

You should check out https://alerthn.com/ (reliable and free).

Also: woah, pipedream is sweet. Looking forward to playing with it.

Dylan, a founder here. One thing we learned from this post is how many great tailored solutions there are for HN alerts. It's pretty amazing.

Thank you for the kind words! We hope it's fun to program in, send us feedback or suggestions any time.

dylan [at] pipedream [dot] com

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/

For people who'd like to digest articles with certain keywords in a weekly manner, try https://hnmail.io

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?

Only article titles are searched.

also interesting: https://github.com/lrusnac/hn-notifier

hmm, wouldn't a RSS to email service combined with something like https://siftrss.com/ do the job?!

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