Automating Trend Research: How I Built a Pipeline to Track What People Are Saying

I used to spend hours every week manually checking Hacker News and Reddit for trending topics in my niches. Open a tab, search, scroll, copy links, summarize in a doc… repeat. It was mind-numbing and inconsistent. Then I built the Research & Trend Report Workflow —a fully automated pipeline that scrapes the internet's best discussion hubs, compiles a curated report with my own commentary, and delivers it to my inbox. This thing has transformed how I stay on top of trends. And the best part? It's all built with simple tools (PowerShell, Python scripts, public APIs) and runs on a schedule. No paid services, no complex infrastructure. Let me show you how it works. What This Pipeline Actually Does Every time it runs (I have it set to weekly, but it can be ad-hoc too), here's the flow: Search Hacker News via Algolia API for recent stories matching my keywords Search Reddit via JSON API for posts in target subreddits Fetch article content from the URLs (when possible) Generate summaries and