Hacker News

Hacker News is built in: both of its APIs are public, so there is nothing to connect and no account to authorize. The moment a marketing campaign targets Hacker News, your marketing seat starts watching it — every 15 minutes, all day. Stories and comments both count, so a launch thread and the questions under it are found the same way.

What it finds shows up as signals; the ones worth answering come back as drafted replies waiting for your approval. The marketing seat can also propose posts of its own — a Show HN for your launch, or a reply into a thread it thinks you should be part of.

You do the posting

Hacker News has no posting API, and Sapient would not use one if it existed. An approved draft comes back ready to post: a reply links straight to the thread it answers, and a Show HN opens HN’s submit form with the title and link already filled in — you paste the text and publish it yourself, under your own account. That keeps a person between the agent and Hacker News, which is what HN’s community expects.

Turn it on

There is no connect form — the card on Settings → Connectors shows Hacker News as built in. Monitoring follows your campaigns instead:

1. Ask your marketing seat to create a campaign targeting Hacker News (or create one yourself under Marketing). A campaign that names no platforms watches Hacker News by default.
2. Give it keywords a real person would type while describing the problem your product solves — not just your brand name. Every keyword is a separate search on every pass.

Keywords decide what you see

Hacker News search is literal. “expense tracking” finds people asking about expense tracking; “fintech” finds everything and nothing. Start narrow, look at the signals that come back, and let your marketing seat sharpen the list.

What happens once it’s active

1. Every 15 minutes, monitoring searches Hacker News — stories and comments — for each campaign keyword and captures matches as signals.
2. Each new signal is scored for intent. Strong ones get a drafted, value-first reply.
3. Every draft runs the compliance checks (banned phrases, unsupported claims, the per-day cap), then waits in your Approvals queue with the source conversation attached.
4. You review, edit if you like, and approve — then click through and post it yourself.
5. The daily marketing read-out in chat summarizes what was found and what is waiting on you.

Suggested posts

Beyond replies, the marketing seat can file suggestions of its own — most usefully a Show HN when you have something to launch. A suggestion carries a title (HN caps titles at 80 characters), the link to submit, and the text to post beside it. It goes through exactly the same compliance checks and the same approval queue as everything else; approving one gives you HN’s submit form pre-filled with the title and link.

Suggestions are paced deliberately: at most 5 per day reach the queue. Hacker News notices promotional cadence, and a steady drip of asks is how accounts get flagged.

If you want this on a schedule, ask your marketing seat to set up a recurring review — “check the Hacker News feed each weekday and suggest replies or a Show HN” — and it will work the fresh signals each cycle.

What Sapient keeps, and for how long

Monitoring stores what it captured: the author’s username, an excerpt, and a link to the thread. Two background passes keep that store honest:

• Retention. Captured conversations are scrubbed after 30 days — the username and text go; a tombstone stays so the same post is never re-captured.
• Deletion reconciliation. Once a week per signal, Sapient re-checks each captured item against Hacker News’s official API. An item that was deleted or killed upstream is scrubbed immediately rather than waiting out the 30 days.

Limits

• Read-only. Sapient never posts, votes, or comments on Hacker News — there is no API that would allow it, and every publish is a human handoff.
• No account, no karma. Because nothing connects, Sapient cannot see your HN account, karma, or inbox — only the public firehose.
• Search freshness. Results come from HN’s public search index, newest first. A thread can take a few minutes to appear after it is posted.