Hacker News Mention Monitor — Brand & Keyword Alerts from HN

Someone just mentioned your product in a Hacker News comment. Do you find out in 10 minutes — while the thread is alive and you can still join the conversation — or three days later from a traffic spike you can't explain?

This Actor watches Hacker News for new mentions of any phrase — in stories and comments — and outputs only what appeared since the last run. Schedule it every 15–30 minutes and pipe mentions to Slack: that's a real-time HN listening post for cents a day.

What it does

• Monitor any phrases — brand names, product names, competitor names, founder names, category terms. Exact match with quotes ("claude code") or loose match without.
• Stories and comments — most brand conversation on HN happens in comments; most tools only watch titles. This one reads both.
• Only the new stuff — stateful between runs: the first run silently records the current state, every following run emits only fresh mentions. No duplicates, no noise.
• Point threshold — optionally ignore low-score stories while keeping all comments.

Who uses this

• Founders & devtools teams — join HN threads about your product while they're hot; HN comment velocity decides whether a thread lives or dies.
• Marketing & comms — track competitor mentions and category conversations.
• Investors & researchers — monitor portfolio companies and technology trends as they surface.

Output example

{
  "type": "new_mention",
  "query": "\"claude code\"",
  "kind": "comment",
  "title": "Ask HN: What's your AI coding setup?",
  "excerpt": "I run several AI coding agents — Claude Code, Codex...",
  "author": "somedev",
  "points": null,
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45872011",
  "createdAt": "2026-08-04T09:12:33.000Z",
  "detectedAt": "2026-08-04T09:30:00.000Z"
}

Input

Field	Description
queries	Phrases to monitor (quotes = exact match)
includeComments	Watch comments too (default on)
minPoints	Ignore stories below this score
maxMentionsPerQuery	Fetch window per run
monitorId	State namespace shared between runs

Reliability

Built on the official HN Algolia search API — public, keyless, and stable for over a decade. Strict schema validation on every item. Deduplication survives across runs via a rolling window of seen IDs.

Scheduling

This Actor shines on short schedules: every 15–30 minutes via an Apify Schedule, with a Slack or webhook integration. A quiet run costs a fraction of a cent — a day of real-time monitoring costs less than a coffee refill.