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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Oh wow, there you are.

I just wanted to say that I absolutely love this series of Harry Potter stories. Awesome. Brilliant. Genius. This is as someone who does read a lot as well. It's really, really, really excellent. It's the only mostly static website on the web which I go and manually check every couple of days, excited at the thought that maybe there's a new chapter up. It's like having a child's Christmas every few days. I love it.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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I hope I'm not raining on your Christmas, but if you register at FanFiction.net, you can subscribe to get an email whenever a new chapter is posted. That way you find out about new chapters quickly, and you don't have to check manually. That's what I do, anyway. There's also an unofficial RSS feed:

http://demented.no-ip.org/~feep/rss_proxy.cgi?5782108

Oh, I know about the RSS feed, I just prefer it this way. :-)

Highly irrational, but I understand and approve!

What's rational depends entirely on what you want. For someone who enjoys the excitement of periodically checking FanFiction.net to see if HP:MoR has been updated, it's a deliciously rational thing to do.

I actually built a feed-builder: http://ffnetupdates.inklesspen.com/

Sign up (no email or password, just a UUID), track as many authors or stories as you like in one Atom feed. It will let you know when wordcount changes even if there's no new chapter, or when your favorite author has a new story.

"Thanks," he said in the small, awkward voice of someone who'd never quite figured out how to take a compliment like that gracefully.

It strikes me as slightly ironic that this book is so popular here. After all, it's in praise of rationality, whereas HN is a community of entrepreneurs; A profession where the odds against you are so great that you almost couldn't get out of bed in the morning without delusions of grandeur, or at least a healthy dose of narcissism.

Right, and the main character of this story never faces heavy odds, nor tries to do anything ambitious, and nobody in his universe ever accused him of having delusions of grandeur... I gotta ask here, have you read up to Chapter 5?

Nope, didn't read it. I didn't realize the book touched on this, though it wasn't meant as a criticism of the book (or HN) anyway.

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