Hacker News Bot Top Stories

Update May 2016: This bot is retired, have a look at its successor https://github.com/sengaya/hackernews-twitter-bot

This program is used to run a bot which posts the top stories of Hacker News to Twitter. It uses the unofficial HN API at http://api.ihackernews.com/ official HN API at https://github.com/HackerNews/API. The bot posts stories to Twitter that reach a certain rank "N" on Hacker News.

Follow @hn_bot_top1 to see the bot in action: https://twitter.com/hn_bot_top1

Dependencies

pip install python-twitter

Configuration

The bot needs some credentials for posting to Twitter:

• filename: hn-bot-top-stories.credentials
• ini-style:

    [hn_bot_topN]
    consumer_key = ...
    consumer_secret = ...
    access_token_key = ...
    access_token_secret = ...

• one section per bot (twitter account)

Run

./hn-bot-top-stories N [...]

• need at least one argument N
• for multiple bots make sure to have a corresponding section in the credentials file
• usually invoked by cron

Seen files

The program stores already posted stories in a simple file: seenN.db

Known Bugs

As this bot runs every 5 minutes and uses api.ihackernews.com (which is great, but quite often returns with an error 500) 2 minutes (in my setup via cron), it can happen that the bot misses stories that are on a certain rank only for a short time.

Example

./hn-bot-top-stories 1 5 30

• requires 3 Twitter credentials (section [hn-bot-top1], [hn-bot-top5] and [hn-bot-top30])
• creates 3 seen files (seen1.db, seen5.db and seen30.db)
• fetch a list of current top stories
• if rank 1 is not in seen1.db, fetch story and post it to Twitter
• repeat this for rank 1-5 and 1-30