
Show HN: I Built a “Google Alerts” for Hacker News - marcxmiller
https://pipedream.com/@marc/google-alerts-for-hacker-news-p_jmCzVJ/readme
======
dylburger
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...](https://pipedream.com/@dylburger/google-alerts-for-hacker-news-
p_ezCJ7p/readme) .

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.

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

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

~~~
Austin_Conlon
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.

~~~
codeplea
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/](https://f5bot.com/)) for a week. You may be surprised at
how many more hits it gets over Google Alerts.

~~~
d3v
Perhaps you should share that you own/operate f5bot

~~~
codeplea
Of course. It's not a secret.

------
gitgud
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/](https://docs.pipedream.com/pricing/)

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

~~~
nailer
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.

~~~
dylburger
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?

~~~
nailer
Here's what it looks like at 100%:
[https://imgur.com/a/OgFAtIV](https://imgur.com/a/OgFAtIV)

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

------
symkat
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.

~~~
marcxmiller
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.

~~~
nailer
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.

------
dankohn1
Also very useful are [http://www.hnreplies.com](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.

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

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

~~~
mehrdadn
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.

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

------
marcxmiller
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.

~~~
stevejohnson0
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?

~~~
dylburger
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!

------
eternal_virgin
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 :)

~~~
kiwicopple
I use F5bot and it’s great

~~~
Multicomp
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).

------
alpb
I think it already exists for quite a while:
[https://www.hnwatcher.com](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.

------
michal_a
I'm running [https://mentionme.app](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.

~~~
paulcarroty
Google account locked.

------
mooreds
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](https://hnnotify-bgon9.transposit.io)

You can see the app code here:
[https://console.transposit.com/t/mooreds/hnnotify/code/op/ge...](https://console.transposit.com/t/mooreds/hnnotify/code/op/getTopStories)

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)

------
adieu
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](https://porter.io)

------
jonbaer
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=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=last24h&type=story)

------
calvinmorrison
Alternative I use is hnwatcher. No complaonts about it

------
mceachen
You should check out [https://alerthn.com/](https://alerthn.com/) (reliable
and free).

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

~~~
dylburger
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

------
sytelus
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/

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

~~~
garysahota93
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?

~~~
desmonding
Only article titles are searched.

------
painted
also interesting: [https://github.com/lrusnac/hn-
notifier](https://github.com/lrusnac/hn-notifier)

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

