Hacker News

Hacker News is Pitchbox's second outreach platform. It has no official auth API for outreach and no DM primitive, so Pitchbox never authenticates against it: the human signs in to news.ycombinator.com in their own browser, and Pitchbox only drafts text for the human to paste and submit.

Setup

Add an HN account from Projects → [project] → Accounts with the platform hackernews and your username. No password or token is stored: HN provides no auth API for outreach, so Pitchbox only tracks the handle.

What Pitchbox drafts

Two scenarios, each backed by its own playbook:

• hn-commenter (playbooks/hn-commenter.md) fetches candidate stories with hn_search and drafts post_comment replies on threads where the project genuinely adds value. Never a pitch.
• hn-poster (playbooks/hn-poster.md) studies the current front page, Show HN and Ask HN listings, then drafts 1-3 proactive top-level submissions (kind: "post"): a Show HN launch, an Ask HN question, or a plain text post.

Both playbooks call the same hn_search tool to fetch listings (top / new / best / ask / show, optionally filtered by a case-insensitive substring on title/text) from the public Firebase HN API (hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0), and neither ever submits anything: the human reviews the draft in the inbox and posts it themselves.

Compose URLs

The dashboard's "Open in HN" link is built server-side from the draft kind:

• post_comment / comment_reply drafts open news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=<itemId>, using the story id recorded in the draft's metadata.
• post drafts (from hn-poster) open news.ycombinator.com/submit. HN's submit form does not accept query-string prefill, so the human pastes the drafted title and body manually.
• dm never applies: HN has no DM primitive, and both playbooks are hard-forbidden from emitting one.

Quota

Hacker News has no platform-specific entry in the seeded quota_defaults, so it falls back to the platform-agnostic defaults: 50/day and 200/week for comments, 5/day and 20/week for posts, 10/day and 50/week for DMs (never used, since HN drafts no DMs). An operator can change these from Settings → Quota.

Limitations

• No DMs. The platform has none, so hn-commenter and hn-poster only ever produce post_comment and post drafts.
• No reply tracking. The daemon's reply poller only polls platforms with a registered reply reader, and Hacker News does not have one yet (not even the inert NullReplyReader used for Reddit): a comment or reply thread never auto-advances to replied.
• Rate limits on the Firebase API are generous but undocumented. The shared adapter caps every listing fetch at 100 items per call regardless of the requested limit.