Slacker: Your Personal Watchdog for Hacker News
Imagine: someone mentioned your startup in a Hacker News comment, and you had no idea. You missed valuable feedback, criticism, or an opportunity to join the discussion. Sound familiar? The Vercel Labs team created a solution — Slacker, a Slack bot that serves as your personal Hacker News monitoring assistant.
What can Slacker do?
Slacker is a bot that:
- Checks for new posts and comments on Hacker News every minute
- Searches for mentions of your product, company, or keywords
- Sends a notification to your Slack channel when a match is found
- Automatically expands link previews for easy viewing
Who is this for?
- Startup founders — to respond quickly to discussions about their product
- PR managers — for monitoring company reputation
- Developers — to track mentions of their open-source projects
- Investors — to follow discussions about technologies they're interested in
How does it work technically?
- Vercel Cron Jobs trigger a check every minute via
/api/cron - Hacker News API provides data on new posts
- Upstash (Redis) stores the last checked ID and keywords
- Slack API sends notifications and expands previews
// Пример обработки cron-задачи
async function checkNewPosts() {
const lastCheckedId = await redis.get('lastCheckedId');
const latestPostId = await getMaxItemId();
// Проверка каждого нового поста
for (let i = lastCheckedId + 1; i <= latestPostId; i++) {
const post = await getPost(i);
if (containsKeywords(post)) {
await notifySlack(post);
}
}
}
Practical use cases
- Responding to feedback — answer user questions right away
- Crisis management — find out about negative discussions quickly
- Competitor analysis — monitor mentions of similar products
- Finding ideas — discover non-obvious use cases for your product
How to get started?
There are two options:
- Ready-made solution — install the bot in Slack with one click:
- Custom version — deploy on Vercel with custom settings
Slacker is a simple yet powerful tool for anyone who needs to stay on top of what people are saying about their product in one of the most influential tech communities. Thanks to its integration with Vercel and Upstash, the solution runs fast and reliably. Give it a try — you might discover something about your project that you've been missing.
The project was built by the Vercel Labs team with contributions from Steven Tey and other experts. The code is open source under the MIT license.
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