Today, I'm releasing the Hacker News Plain Domain Tracker.

A self-hosted GitHub Action that monitors Hacker News every 15 minutes, detects new product domains, and stores them in your PostgreSQL database.

No monthly fees. No vendor lock-in. Just raw, real-time startup intelligence.

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The Problem We Solved

Hacker News is where startups announce themselves. Not blog posts. Not deep links. The raw domain: newstartup.com.

But the front page moves fast. Miss a 4-hour window, and you've missed the launch entirely.

I built a filter. This tracker ignores the noise (github.com/org/repo, medium.com/article) and captures only plain domains and subdomains—the signal that matters.

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What Gets Captured

✅ example.com
✅ app.example.com
❌ example.com/blog/post
❌ github.com/org/repo

Every 15 minutes, the monitor saves:

• Domain — the root domain
• Subdomain — if present
• HN Score — engagement metric
• Submitter — who posted it
• Timestamp — when it appeared

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Getting Started

Requirements:

• PostgreSQL (Neon, Supabase, RDS)
• GitHub repository
• Python 3.9+

Setup:

CREATE TABLE hn_plain_domains (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    hn_id TEXT UNIQUE NOT NULL,
    domain TEXT NOT NULL,
    subdomain TEXT,
    url TEXT NOT NULL,
    title TEXT,
    score INTEGER,
    author TEXT,
    created_at TIMESTAMP NOT NULL
);

Configure:

DATABASE_URL = "postgresql://USER:PASSWORD@HOST/DATABASE?sslmode=require"

Run:

pip install requests psycopg2-binary
python script.py

Deploy: Push to GitHub, enable Actions. Done. 🎉

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What You'll See

🌐 Found 9 plain domains on HN
✅ Inserted 6 new records

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Why This Matters

Every day, founders share their domains on HN hoping to get traction. Investors, journalists, and competitors are watching.

Now you can watch too—automatically.

One-time purchase. Runs forever. Your data, your database.

Welcome to early access.