Ask HN: HN comment-respond notifications, useful?

I thought about a feature I would like to have for HN; some kind of notification whenever someone responds to one of my submissions / comments.

I like notifications, the only reason why I actually respond to skype messages is because of the little icon in my taskbar. I would also like to respond to HN comments, the problem is, I forget to check the sites. So I thought some kind of browser notification would be nice.

If you agree that this feature would be useful, and like to use it, program it, because I won’t. Here is the thing, I can’t program, I am willing to learn, but I don’t want to wait for this feature until I am able to do it myself (years). I have no idea how to implement it, but I guess some kind of javascript snippet, or Mozilla addon, or Chrome extension, or similar. (I suppose an hourly email digest would even do it)

The notification should have an input field for the username and get the comment responses in some fashion like:

1. Got to the /threads?id=username

2. Check if there are any new <a href=user?id=username> since the last time the site was visited.

3. Show some kind of notification for the number of new entries on the site that don’t match the username

If that description is confusing, it is because I really have no idea how to do this kind of thing.

This somehow described how to track the responses to the comments, but I wouldn’t know where to start for the user’s submissions.

Anyway, all that done, it would also be nice to be able to track other users. Notify me, if someone I am “following” made a submission or comment (not the responses to his/her comments, just comments from the user I want to track)

In the case there is already a tool like this available; I would kindly ask you to tell me about it.