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January 22, 2026

Hacker News to Slack, brand mentions ranked for you

Hacker News to Slack, brand mentions ranked for you - n8n workflow automation template
Lisa Granqvist Partner Workflow Automation Expert
Hacker News to Slack, brand mentions ranked for you - n8n workflow automation template
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You shouldn’t have to “go hunting” on Hacker News to learn your brand just got talked about. But that’s what happens. You refresh, skim headlines, open threads, then try to decide if it’s a big deal or just noise.

This is where HN Slack automation pays off fast. Marketing managers feel it when chatter spikes. Founders feel it when a single comment turns into a narrative. And PR leads don’t want surprises waiting in a screenshot someone sends hours later.

This workflow pulls fresh Hacker News mentions every morning, ranks them, labels sentiment and urgency with AI, and drops a clean digest into Slack. You’ll see what it does, what you need, and how to make it fit your keyword and team habits.

How This Automation Works

The full n8n workflow, from trigger to final output:

n8n Workflow Template: Hacker News to Slack, brand mentions ranked for you

The Problem: Brand mentions get noticed too late

Hacker News moves in bursts. A post can sit quietly, then jump to the front page when the right person comments or a newsletter picks it up. If you’re checking manually, you tend to check at the wrong times, or you check too often and burn attention on nothing. Worse, when you finally do find a mention, you still have to answer the real question: is this positive buzz, mild criticism, or an early warning that needs a response today? That judgment call is the part that drains you.

The friction compounds. It usually looks like this:

  • You spend about 20 minutes a day searching, opening threads, and scanning comments, and it still feels incomplete.
  • The team hears about mentions through random Slack messages, which means context is missing and urgency is guessed.
  • By the time someone flags a negative thread, the conversation has already shaped opinions.
  • Even when you find a mention, you still have to summarize it for others who never saw the original post.

The Solution: Daily Hacker News mention digest to Slack

This workflow runs on a daily schedule (09:00) and checks Hacker News for stories that match your brand keyword(s). It pulls results through the Hacker News Algolia API, then cleans up the raw data into consistent fields like title, URL, snippet, author, and points so your summary doesn’t look messy. Next, an AI agent uses GPT-4o-mini to classify each mention for sentiment and urgency (and also stance and topic), so you’re not stuck doing gut-check triage every morning. Finally, the workflow composes a ranked “top mentions” report (up to the top 10) and posts it to Slack. If there are no mentions, it posts a simple “no mentions today” update instead, so silence is still an answer.

The workflow starts with your brand settings and a scheduled check. Then it fetches and standardizes the mention list, gates out low-signal cases, and runs the remaining items through AI classification. Slack gets the final digest your team can act on.

What You Get: Automation vs. Results

Example: What This Looks Like

Say you track one brand name plus two common misspellings, and you check Hacker News twice a day. Manually, that’s maybe 10 minutes per check, plus another 10 minutes to summarize anything you find for Slack, which lands around 30 minutes daily. With this workflow, you spend about 5 minutes once to set your keywords, then it runs at 09:00 and posts a ranked top-10 digest automatically. Most mornings you just read one Slack message and move on.

What You’ll Need

  • n8n instance (try n8n Cloud free)
  • Self-hosting option if you prefer (Hostinger works well)
  • Slack for delivering the daily digest to your team.
  • OpenAI to classify sentiment and urgency with GPT-4o-mini.
  • OpenAI API key (get it from your OpenAI dashboard under API keys)

Skill level: Beginner. You’ll connect accounts, paste an API key, and adjust a keyword or two.

Don’t want to set this up yourself? Talk to an automation expert (free 15-minute consultation).

How It Works

A daily schedule starts the run. At 09:00, n8n kicks off the workflow so you’re not relying on someone remembering to check Hacker News.

Your brand settings get loaded. The workflow pulls in the brand name and keyword filters you’ve set, which keeps the rest of the steps reusable (change keywords once, not everywhere).

Hacker News mentions are fetched and cleaned up. An HTTP request hits the Algolia API, then the results are standardized into consistent fields like title, URL, snippet, author, and points. There’s also a quick gate so you don’t waste effort on low-signal cases.

AI labels each mention for fast triage. The AI agent uses GPT-4o-mini to return structured sentiment, stance, topic, and urgency, then those fields are mapped into a format that’s easy to summarize.

A Slack-ready report is created and delivered. The workflow composes a ranked daily summary (top 10 plus sentiment totals) and posts it to Slack. If there are no mentions, it posts a simple “no new mentions today” message instead.

You can easily modify the brand keywords to monitor competitors or product names based on your needs. See the full implementation guide below for customization options.

Step-by-Step Implementation Guide

Step 1: Configure the Schedule Trigger

Set the workflow to run on a daily schedule so brand mentions are collected automatically.

  1. Add and open Daily Schedule Trigger.
  2. Set the cron expression in Rule to 0 9 * * * to run daily at 09:00.
  3. Connect Daily Schedule Trigger to Brand Settings.

If you want a different timezone, adjust your n8n instance timezone or update the cron expression accordingly.

Step 2: Connect Hacker News and Configure Brand Inputs

Define the brand and keywords, then fetch mention data from the Hacker News API.

  1. Open Brand Settings and set brand to OpenAI.
  2. In Brand Settings, set keywords to OpenAI.
  3. Open HN Mention Retrieval and set URL to =http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query={{$json["keywords"]}}&tags=story.
  4. In HN Mention Retrieval, enable Send Headers and add User-Agent with value n8n-monitor-bot.
  5. Connect Brand Settings → HN Mention Retrieval.

⚠️ Common Pitfall: If keywords is blank, HN Mention Retrieval will return unrelated results. Always set a valid keyword string.

Step 3: Set Up Processing and AI Classification

Normalize mention data, filter by comment volume, and classify sentiment with AI.

  1. Open Standardize Mention Records to confirm the JavaScript code is pasted as provided for normalization.
  2. Connect HN Mention Retrieval → Standardize Mention Records.
  3. Open Comment Volume Gate and ensure the condition uses Left Value ={{ $json.num_comments }} and Right Value 1000.
  4. Open Mentions Present? and ensure the condition uses Left Value ={{ $items().length }} and Right Value 0.
  5. Open AI Sentiment Classifier and set Text to =Brand: {{$json["brand"]}} Platform: {{$json["platform"]}} Title: {{$json["title"]}} Snippet: {{$json["snippet"]}} Determine how this mention talks about the brand. .
  6. Connect the AI sub-nodes to AI Sentiment Classifier: OpenAI Chat Engine (language model), Conversation Memory Buffer (memory), and Structured Output Parser (output parser).
  7. In Map Sentiment Fields, map fields from the AI output using expressions like ={{ $json.output.sentiment }}, ={{ $json.output.stance }}, ={{ $json.output.topic }}, ={{ $json.output.urgency }}, and ={{ $json.output.reason }}.

Credential Required: Connect your openAiApi credentials in OpenAI Chat Engine. The Conversation Memory Buffer and Structured Output Parser are AI sub-nodes—credentials must be added to OpenAI Chat Engine, not those sub-nodes.

If the AI output does not match the structured schema, verify the system message in AI Sentiment Classifier and the JSON schema example in Structured Output Parser.

Step 4: Configure Output and Slack Notifications

Create a daily report for Slack when mentions exist and a fallback notice when there are none.

  1. Open Compose Daily Summary and confirm the JavaScript code is pasted as provided to build the report text.
  2. Open Post Report to Slack and set Text to ={{$json["text"]}}, then choose your Slack channel.
  3. Open Create No-Mention Notice and set text to =No new AI engine mentions were found today for {{$node["Brand Settings"].json["brand"]}}..
  4. Open Post No-Mention to Slack and set Text to ={{$json["text"]}}, then choose your Slack channel.
  5. Confirm the routing: Mentions Present? → AI Sentiment Classifier (true) and Mentions Present? → Create No-Mention Notice (false).

Credential Required: Connect your slackApi credentials in Post Report to Slack and Post No-Mention to Slack.

⚠️ Common Pitfall: If the Slack channel is not selected, messages will fail silently. Always select a valid channel in both Slack nodes.

Step 5: Add Error Handling

Route runtime errors to Slack so you can troubleshoot quickly.

  1. Open Failure Trigger to confirm it is present as the error handler trigger.
  2. Open Post Error Alert and set Text to =⚠️ *Error in API Error Catalog Workflow* *Node:* {{ $json.node.name }} *Message:* {{ $json.error.message }} *Time:* {{ $json.timestamp }}.
  3. Connect Failure Trigger → Post Error Alert.

Credential Required: Connect your slackOAuth2Api credentials in Post Error Alert.

Step 6: Test and Activate Your Workflow

Validate the data flow end-to-end and then enable the automation for production.

  1. Click Execute Workflow to run manually and confirm HN Mention Retrieval returns data.
  2. Verify that Compose Daily Summary produces a single item with a text field.
  3. Check Slack for a report from Post Report to Slack or a notice from Post No-Mention to Slack.
  4. Trigger a failure (e.g., invalid URL) to confirm Post Error Alert sends a Slack message.
  5. Toggle the workflow to Active to enable scheduled execution.
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Common Gotchas

  • Slack credentials can expire or need specific permissions. If things break, check the Slack app installation and token scopes in your n8n credentials first.
  • If you’re using Wait nodes or external rendering, processing times vary. Bump up the wait duration if downstream nodes fail on empty responses.
  • Default prompts in AI nodes are generic. Add your brand voice early or you’ll be editing outputs forever.

Related Workflows

If your team also needs a durable audit trail, Bright Data + Google Sheets for brand mention logs pairs nicely with this daily Slack digest so you can keep a running history for reporting and retrospectives.

For teams doing community monitoring beyond Hacker News, Reddit to Notion, sentiment insights you can act on gives you a place to capture themes, tag competitors, and store decisions alongside the raw mentions.

When you want real-time pings instead of a morning rollup, Reddit + Slack: never miss a brand mention again is the “someone just said your name” companion to this slower, calmer daily report.

Need a broader news lens for exec updates? Google News + Telegram: daily AI digest, summarized works well when you’re tracking the market and press coverage alongside community chatter.

Finally, if you want a lightweight way to catch social mentions that aren’t on Hacker News at all, Google Sheets + Slack: smarter tweet mention alerts helps you route “worth responding to” tweets into the same Slack channel your team already watches.


Quick reference:

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to set up this HN Slack automation automation?

About 30 minutes if your Slack and OpenAI accounts are ready.

Do I need coding skills to automate Hacker News mention monitoring?

No. You’ll mostly paste in credentials and change the brand keyword settings.

Is n8n free to use for this HN Slack automation workflow?

Yes. n8n has a free self-hosted option and a free trial on n8n Cloud. Cloud plans start at $20/month for higher volume. You’ll also need to factor in OpenAI API usage (usually just a few dollars a month for one daily digest, depending on how many mentions you classify).

Where can I host n8n to run this automation?

Two options: n8n Cloud (managed, easiest setup) or self-hosting on a VPS. For self-hosting, Hostinger VPS is affordable and handles n8n well. Self-hosting gives you unlimited executions but requires basic server management.

Can I customize this HN Slack automation workflow for multiple brands or competitor tracking?

Yes, but keep it simple at first. Update the Brand Settings step to include multiple keywords, then reuse the same retrieval and classification steps for each term. Many teams also tweak the AI Sentiment Classifier prompt so “urgency” matches their reality (for example, treat security claims as high urgency). If you want separate Slack channels per brand, duplicate the Slack posting step and route based on the keyword.

Why is my Slack connection failing in this workflow?

Usually it’s an expired token or missing Slack scopes for posting messages. Reconnect the Slack credential in n8n, then confirm the app is installed in the workspace and has access to the channel you’re posting into. If it posts to some channels but not others, it’s often private-channel access. Also check your n8n error execution logs, because Slack’s API responses are pretty clear when permissions are the problem.

How many mentions can this HN Slack automation automation handle?

Plenty for most teams. The summary is designed around a top 10 ranked digest, so even if the API returns more items, you’re not flooding Slack. On n8n Cloud, your practical limit is your monthly executions and how you batch items, while self-hosting mostly depends on your server. If you expect lots of results (for very generic keywords), add stricter filters in the retrieval step to keep the AI costs predictable.

Is this HN Slack automation automation better than using Zapier or Make?

For this use case, n8n is often the better fit because you can do richer branching (mentions vs. no mentions, plus error handling) without turning it into a pricing nightmare. It also handles “fetch, transform, classify, summarize” patterns cleanly, especially when you want structured AI output you can trust. Zapier and Make can absolutely work, but you’ll usually spend more time fighting formatting, iteration limits, or multi-step costs. If your workflow needs to grow into “multiple keywords, multiple channels, saved logs,” n8n tends to age better. Talk to an automation expert if you want a quick recommendation for your exact stack.

A daily Slack digest sounds small, but it changes how fast you react. Set it up once, then let the workflow keep watch while you focus on the work that actually moves the business.

Need Help Setting This Up?

Our automation experts can build and customize this workflow for your specific needs. Free 15-minute consultation—no commitment required.

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Lisa Granqvist

Workflow Automation Expert

Expert in workflow automation and no-code tools.

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