ceven

Hacker News

Monitors Hacker News for specific keywords, tracks competitor mentions in real time, and aggregates technical discussions into your internal knowledge base.

Try Hacker News in Ceven

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Why use Ceven?

  1. AI native Hacker News integration

    • Describe the outcome and Ceven picks the right Hacker News calls, fills the parameters, and checks the result.
    • Structured, agent friendly tool schemas so each call runs reliably instead of by guesswork.
    • Rich coverage for reading, writing, and querying your Hacker News data, across all 14 of its actions.

  2. Managed auth

    • Built in OAuth with automatic token refresh and rotation.
    • One place to manage, scope, and revoke Hacker News access.
    • Per user and per environment credentials instead of shared keys.

  3. Agent optimized design

    • Actions are tuned from real success and error rates so reliability climbs over time.
    • Full execution logs so you always know what ran in Hacker News, when, and on whose behalf.
    • The agent pauses and asks when Hacker News is unclear instead of plowing ahead.

  4. Enterprise grade security

    • Fine grained access so you control which agents and people can reach Hacker News.
    • Least privilege by default, read scopes first and only the writes a workflow needs.
    • A full audit trail of every Hacker News action to support review and sign off.

Supported tools

Every action Ceven's agents can run on Hacker News, and when to use it.

Get Frontpage
Use this to pull the current top stories on the Hacker News home page for sentiment analysis or trend spotting.
Get Item
Pull a specific story, comment, or poll using its unique ID to analyze deep thread conversations.
Get Latest Posts
Pull the most recent submissions to catch breaking news before they hit the front page.
Get Today Posts
Pull all stories submitted within the last twenty four hours to create daily summaries.
Get User
Pull a specific user profile by username to check their submission history and karma.
Search Posts
Query Hacker News for specific keywords or phrases to find historical discussions on a topic.
Filter Top Stories
Filter the front page list by specific keywords to isolate relevant industry news.
Track Story Growth
Monitor the point count of a specific item over time to detect viral growth.
Extract Thread Tree
Recursively pull all replies to a specific post to map out a full technical debate.
Analyze User Activity
Pull a list of all stories submitted by a specific user to identify their areas of expertise.
Fetch Item Metadata
Get the raw metadata for a post including the submitter and timestamp for auditing.
Scan New Submissions
Check the newest submissions every few minutes to trigger instant alerts for brand mentions.
Get Hackernews Frontpage
Get the frontpage posts of hacker news.
Get Hackernews Item
Get a specific item from hacker news using its id. limits response size to prevent context overflow.
Get Latest Hackernews Posts
Get the latest posts from hacker news based on optional filters. results can be limited using the size parameter.
Get Hackernews Today Posts
Get today's posts from hacker news.
Get Hackernews User
Get a specific user from hacker news using their username.
Search Hackernews Posts
Get relevant posts from hacker news based on a full text query and optional filters. results can be limited using the size parameter.

18 actions · scroll to see them all

Frequently asked questions

No. Hacker News provides a public API that does not require authentication for read operations. Ceven interacts directly with these public endpoints to fetch stories, comments, and user data. Because the data is public, you do not need to provide any login credentials or API keys to start monitoring the site. The agent simply queries the available endpoints and parses the JSON responses to provide you with the summaries and alerts you need. This makes the setup process instant as there are no OAuth flows or secret keys to manage for basic news aggregation and monitoring workflows.
No. The current integration is read only. The official Hacker News API is designed for data retrieval and does not provide endpoints for submitting stories, posting comments, or voting on items. To maintain the integrity of the platform and avoid spam, Y Combinator restricts write access to the web interface. Ceven focuses on the intelligence side, meaning it can tell you what people are saying and when a topic is trending, but it cannot act as a bot to post content on your behalf. This ensures your account remains safe from being flagged as an automated bot.
Ceven uses a recursive fetching strategy for deep threads. When you ask for a summary of a discussion, the agent first pulls the top level story and then fetches the children items in batches. To prevent context overflow in the AI model, the agent summarizes each branch of the conversation before aggregating them into a final report. This means you get the essence of a thousand comment thread without hitting the token limit of the model. If a thread is exceptionally large, the agent focuses on the highest scoring comments to ensure the most impactful opinions are captured first.
Yes. While Hacker News does not have a strict documented rate limit for the public API, they do employ basic traffic shaping to prevent abuse. Ceven implements an intelligent polling interval to stay within reasonable limits. If the API returns a too many requests error, the agent automatically backs off and retries using an exponential backoff strategy. For most users, checking the front page every few minutes is perfectly fine. However, if you attempt to scrape thousands of individual items in a few seconds, you may see temporary delays in data retrieval while the system resets.
Yes. By using the Get User action, Ceven can pull the submission history of any public username. If you are tracking a specific industry thought leader or a competitor, the agent can monitor their recent activity and notify you whenever they submit a new link or comment on a trending story. This allows you to build a profile of what specific people are interested in and how they are influencing the technical conversation. This is particularly useful for competitive intelligence or identifying potential partners who are active in your specific technical domain.
The monitoring is near real time. Ceven polls the latest posts endpoint at regular intervals. Depending on your workflow settings, this can happen every few minutes. Because Hacker News updates its feed constantly, there is a slight lag between a user hitting submit and the agent detecting the post. However, for the purpose of brand monitoring or trend tracking, this delay is negligible. You will typically receive a notification within minutes of a story appearing in the new submissions queue, which is far faster than manual checking.
The native Hacker News API is limited in its filtering capabilities, as it does not support complex date range queries directly. To solve this, Ceven pulls the available lists and then applies a filter layer within the workflow. The agent checks the timestamp of each item and discards any that fall outside your requested window. This means if you want posts from exactly three days ago, the agent will fetch the relevant blocks of data and manually filter them for you. This ensures you get the precise time window you need despite the API limitations.
If a story is deleted, the API will return a null value or an empty item for that specific ID. Ceven is programmed to handle these missing records gracefully. If a monitored story disappears, the agent will note that the item is no longer available in your report rather than crashing the workflow. If you have already cached a summary of the thread in your internal knowledge base, that summary remains available even if the original source is removed from the site, providing you with a permanent record of the discussion.

Alternatives to Hacker News

Other tools that solve a similar problem. Ceven supports these too, so you can switch or run more than one at once.

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