Show HN: HN Replies – Get notified of replies to your comments
hnreplies.com
hnreplies.com
I check HN's API for new comments every 10 minutes, and send an e-mail notification when a new reply to one of your comments shows up. This is what the notification mail will look like:
I was just about to link HN Notify for this, but sure enough, it's gone. Thanks for the replacement!
Huh; HN Notify does seem to have gone missing. Anyone know what happened to it?
Two pretty trivial suggestions:
- Number the links in square brackets, so they're easier to follow when passed to urlview
- Quotation marks around the topic subject in the body of the email
Wouldn't a browser plugin require you to actively be using HN, or at least have a tab open? Getting an email notification four hours later that someone replied to you on HN, so you may want to take a look is nice (if you don't want to be a slave to HN, don't check your email as often or don't deal immediately with this email).
Additionally, in a browser extension, there's then a lot of people grabbing the comment history rather than a single program, which necessarily puts a higher load on HN.
I'm not sure I understand this sentiment. It's a tool that provides a capability that wasn't there before, so event if it goes away later, you still get the utility it provided while it worked. Since the cost is just providing and email address, that seems a worthwhile trade to me. If it was a trade between this and some other implementation that worked, and it's possible closure at a later date would force you to set up with another service afterwards and you wouldn't if you chose the correct service in the first place, then that's a different story.
> I am sure you could build an extension that polls the HN API every couple of seconds or so to check for replies and have it show a popup when you get a notification as well as send an email.
Well, I'm not sure it would be nice to HN to query them an extra time every few seconds X the number or people that might install the extension. If it's a query every 10 seconds, and 1000 people run it, you've just increased their load by 100 queries a second.
Ultimately, the bits we consume aren't free. Someone pays for them, it just commonly not the consumer in the current model. At the point where you make the person that is paying for them feel it, then the person who pays might end up shifting to you. Or the resource goes away, and everyone loses.
I'm not saying that's likely in this case, but even if it isn't likely, doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it.
It's really not that complicated, and a great starter/hobby project. I imagine the only reason there wasn't a replacement out sooner for the prior site that stopped working is that a lot of us weren't really aware it had stopped, or weren't aware it was dead and not suspended (is it?), or hadn't yet gotten off our buts to make a replacement once we determined the prior site was gone.
It's the kind of small scope and easily defined project that's great for learning a new language.
"It's the kind of small scope and easily defined project that's great for learning a new language."
I totally agree with that. Matter of fact, I was planning on implementing that exact project to learn Rust or Go. :) Might still do it as it remains a good learning experience, esp for stuff you use 80% of the time.
Well, that may have been obvious to you, but I didn't want to assume anything about the asker, and while it appears the majority of users here are developers at times, there are still people that frequent that have little or no practical software engineering experience. In any case, it's easy to overlook features of a site you never or rarely use. I've clicked on the comments feed maybe 3-4 times in a few years, if I hadn't thought about this issue previously (as obviously you have as well), I might or might not have immediately thought about the comments link, and how it's really a feed.
On a side note, any idea why YC doesn't bake this into the HN site itself? Dang, any comment?
The OPs screenshot[0] wasn't clear to me if that was a native browser notification or email popup. I check for new responses whenever I click on a new interesting HN post in my Firefox bookmarks toolbar RSS feed. While another email sitting there waiting defeats the purpose for me. In general my philosophy is lazy eval over eager eval, so to speak.
I created a casual email that I use with no notifications that I check every once in a while. My main email has notifications and if I get one I know it's important.
I, too, was using HN Notify until it suddenly just stopped working. It came back briefly before it disappeared again.
I wish this functionality ought to be built into HN, though. A lot of discussions seem to be die off very quickly, and my hypothesis is that many commenters just don't bother/remember to check back for replies.
Letting the community solve thing externally to HN is well and good, but results in exactly this situation, where a lot of users relied on one user's system when it was abruptly taken offline.
It provided a convenience that, in my case, significantly improved my HN experience (and others', too, since it kept certain conversations alive that otherwise would have faded earlier), an improvement which was then equally subtracted when the service disappeared.
I'd love HN to be community-extensible, though. Current browser extensions are great (I use this [1], which adds thread collapsing and highlights unread comments), but need to be maintained across browsers and typically don't work on mobile.
A better solution would be to allow users to add scripts to their account, which could then be copied into a static location (so the author can't change the code to something disruptive) and inserted into the page body. Then a nice little ecosystem could grow where users shared useful extensions.
As an example of a personal need currenty unfulfilled: I recognize a few HN names, but most I just forget. Each thread is full of anonymous people who I've surely read, and maybe replied to, before. It'd be wonderful to get something (Gravatar icons, expand to full name, unique colorization, "previously replied to person" or "previously upvoted" indicator) for each name to make them easier to remember and recognize, even within a single thread. It's also be great to show company names next to user names.
Given that HN is (probably?) not a revenue source for YC, these kinds of feature wishlists have very different implications, and the relationship between YC and HN users is very different than it would be for reddit/online communities.
Whether it's a priority for YC, well — considering the lo-fi implementation (not sure if it's a myth or if Paul Graham truly intended this as a strategy to avoid attracting the great unwashed as some people have claimed), probably not.
I'd say most comments don't warrant a response. Everyone shared their thoughts, here are some different opinions, we move on.
I think it would also really help to have some kind of notification in the HN header.
For me though, notifications are much more important on reddit than here. Here I can see replies directly on my user page (and replies to them, which I also like to follow), there I'd have to click through to each of my recent comments to check.
So it will lead to more replies from people acting on impulse and arguing.
When you agree with something, you share it. When you disagree, you comment. So thus we can measure how popular and controversial something is by how many shares and comments it has (horizontal and vertical).
- No https
- Loading hnreplies.com causes my browser to load (and leak data to) 5 3rd party domains for various JS and stuff. None of that JS appears to be required for operation of the site (I had it all blocked and it seems to have subscribed me just fine)
On that note, it would actually be rather interesting to see if you could actually sell classified text ads (no tracking images) to send with the e-mails. It might be a nice little way to pay for the service in a pretty basic manner.
Shameless plug for a similar service that notifies when a word is mentioned:
(unless you're looking for someone mentioning your product.)
It grew out of wanting to be informed about any links related to a book I was writing (on 'docker'). Friends have used it eg to be informed about any 'rust' related posts.
I think it's pretty crazy that GMail, from my main account, doesn't let me just make a high-entropy word (buffalowafflesloth) and a tag, so that that email is instantly associated with the tag on my end. It should take me literally 2 clicks to write "hackernews notificaitn" and receive "buffalowafflesloth" in response, meaning anything sent to "buffalowafflesloth" gets to my main email with the "hackernews notificaitn" tag. (And I would give this service "buffalowafflesloth@gmail.com")
Google: if you're reading this do this. Let us give out emails that get a tag, so that later we can redirect it. You already kind-of do this with +SOMETHING but the +SOMETHING part can be removed to get the original email.
I don't need to lock my door either, but that kind of security doesn't scale. I either use mailinator for throwaway email signups, or I have a spam gmail account.
But I'm not going to give out my main account+marker if I expect to want to be able to undo sharing my email in the future at some point that I try to follow an unsubscribe link and it doesn't work, or because my email might get sold: that's just downright silly. You think the kind of people that would sell email lists wouldn't run a regex to strip +spam markers from gmail accounts?
You literally have to apply a one-line regex to do that. It's security by obscurity. Anyone working at google should understand that.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12096?hl=en
everything I wrote applies only and specifically to gmail. it would be trivial to strip the +'s from every gmail address to get right into the person's main inbox.
If I don't trust a person to stop spamming me or sell my email address then I'm not going to trust a person not to do that.
I was saying that regarding to automatically stripping out +string from the email to thwart this. Gmail uses them as a special character, but it is a valid email character, along with all these http://stackoverflow.com/a/2049510
There is mailgun, there is gmail api, there is programming.
but if you think security by obscurity is enough that I should use a solution that instantly stops working once lots of people use it, then more power to you. I'm not going to do that.
also I use gmail because I don't run my own mailserver. I'm not about to start coding.
Do you mind open sourcing that contact form? Its really simple and nice. :)
It has watchers for an HN thread, a reddit post or comment and it can even watch multiple reddit inboxes if you run a small python script locally.
Here [1], just enter the thread id to watch for any replies under that thread
[1] http://z-petal.com/ceasium/#/hackerNews
[2] http://z-petal.com/ng-ceasium/ceasium-html5-angularjs-app-fo...
Top-level comments are okay, but they should be written well enough to stand on it's own, without further clarification. It's not worth the time, mental energy and stress to reply for the tiny value comment replies offer.
If someone has a serious question, private forums (email, chat) are universally better. Comment chains lose all context and worse, stick around forever.