Hacker News Keyword Alerts to Slack (n8n + Groq + Sheets)

Get Hacker News keyword alerts in Slack every two hours—automatically

This n8n workflow watches Hacker News for your chosen keywords, deduplicates already-seen posts using Google Sheets, generates a one-sentence Groq explanation for each new match, and sends a formatted alert to Slack via an incoming webhook.

What this workflow does

• Runs on a schedule: executes every two hours.
• Searches by keywords for recent activity: splits your comma-separated keywords and creates individual Hacker News Algolia search-by-date API queries covering the last seven days.
• Normalizes and tags results: flattens Algolia hits into a clean list of posts and associates each with the matched keyword.
• Filters out repeats with Google Sheets: reads previously logged post URLs from a Google Sheets tab named “SeenPosts”, excludes anything already recorded, and limits results to up to 20 new posts per run.
• Adds context with Groq: sends each new post (keyword, title, snippet) to Groq Chat Completions to produce a single-sentence explanation.
• Alerts Slack and saves history: posts an alert to Slack using an incoming webhook, then upserts the post URL and metadata into Google Sheets to prevent duplicate alerts.

Use cases

• SaaS operators tracking competitors, funding topics, or product-relevant terms on Hacker News.
• Automation engineers monitoring engineering and tooling keywords and sharing them with a team in Slack.
• Building a lightweight “Hacker News radar” without manually checking the site—deduped via Google Sheets.

Technical details

• n8n nodes: Schedule Trigger, HTTP Request, Code, Google Sheets, and Slack webhook.
• External services: Hacker News via Algolia search-by-date API, Groq (Chat Completions), Google Sheets (“SeenPosts” tab), and Slack (incoming webhook).
• Workflow inputs to configure: comma-separated keywords and your Google Sheet ID, plus Groq API credentials and the Slack webhook URL.