hn-launch-thread-triage
HN launch thread triage
Catches Show HN and Launch HN threads in your category, classifies them by relevance and intent, and surfaces the launches worth responding to in a Slack channel.
What it does
- 1
Step 1
Register a catch with "Show HN" or "Launch HN" plus your category terms in the query. Set the source to hackernews and classify to true. Example query: ("Show HN" OR "Launch HN") AND ("social listening" OR "brand monitoring" OR "mention tracking"). - 2
Step 2
Each firing classifies results by intent: announcement, comparison, question, recommendation. The prescore and classification together tell you which launches are relevant to your product and which are noise in an adjacent category. - 3
Step 3
Route results above a prescore threshold to a Slack channel for your team to review. Set min_prescore to 0.3 to filter noise. Launches that mention your product by name or compare to a known competitor get the highest prescores. - 4
Step 4
Review the results in Slack. Your team decides whether to respond. If you reply on Hacker News, follow the community norms: disclose your affiliation in the first sentence, answer the question before mentioning your product, and keep the reply short. discatch does not post on your behalf. - 5
Step 5
Expand the query as your category evolves. Add new competitor names, new product category terms, or phrases like "alternative to" followed by a competitor. Each change is a PATCH to the catch, not a new catch. - 6
Step 6
This playbook ships as a SKILL.md in the dcouple/discatch-playbooks repo so skills.sh and agent skill directories pick it up.
Sources it watches
Common questions
Why 1 hour and not 5 minutes?
Show HN threads stay on the front page for hours and the comment threads develop over a day or more. A 1-hour interval catches every thread within its first hour and costs less than a tighter interval. If you want to respond within minutes of a launch, set the interval to 15m. For most teams, 1h is fast enough to be in the first wave of replies.
Can I catch Ask HN threads too?
Yes. Add "Ask HN" to the query with OR: ("Show HN" OR "Launch HN" OR "Ask HN"). The same catch covers all three thread types. Each is a title prefix on Hacker News stories and the catch matches on the title text.
Does discatch post replies on Hacker News?
Never. discatch catches and hands off. It does not post, comment, or reply on any platform on your behalf. Hacker News detects and flags bot replies. Accounts that post automated responses risk being banned. You read the results in Slack and reply through the Hacker News interface yourself.
What does classify add to the triage?
Without classify, you get the thread title, URL, score, reply count, and prescore. With classify, each result also carries a relevance score, a sentiment, and an intent label that says whether the thread is an announcement, a question, or a comparison. For triage, the intent label helps your team prioritize: comparison threads where someone asks for alternatives are higher value than pure announcements.
How do I know if a launch is in my category?
The query restricts to threads that contain your category terms alongside "Show HN". A thread titled "Show HN: A social listening tool for devtools" would match if your query includes "social listening". The prescore ranks it by how many of your terms appear in the title and body. Threads that only mention an adjacent category score lower.
What if a competitor launches on Hacker News?
If their product name is in your query terms, the catch fires on it. If not, the competitor-watch or competitor-changelog-watch playbooks cover competitor launches separately. You can combine all three: this playbook for category launches, competitor-watch for brand mentions, and competitor-changelog-watch for release reactions.
Last reviewed by Parsa Khazaeepoul, founder, dcouple. Copy from docs/playbooks.md.