This bot posts stories to Twitter that reach a certain rank on Hacker News.
While there are some bots like @newsycombinator that post just too much (for my taste), there are especially the bots of Jeff Miller that got my attention. The score thresholds these bots use is a good way to filter out HN stories. However I'd like to read the HN top stories no matter what their score is (and I needed a reason to hack a bot).
For now there is one bot which posts stories with rank 1: @hn_bot_top1 (link)
I might add bots with top 3 and/or top 5 stories, but the top 1 bot already posts about 10 to 20 stories a day. If you are interested in Hacker News statistics I recommend hnrankings.info with a nice visualization of rank statistics.
The bot is written in Python. It uses python-Twitter for posting to Twitter and the unofficial HN API at api.ihackernews.com to get data.
As this bot runs every 5 minutes and uses api.ihackernews.com (which is great, but quite often returns with an error 500), it can happen that the bot misses stories that are on rank 1 only for a short time.