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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I use the HN email reply notification by Dan Grossman.

http://www.hnreplies.com/

It find it would be impossible to maintain a useful discussion that lasts longer than just a few hours without it. It would be single drive-by comments without dialogue. I probably wouldn’t use HN at all if I didn’t have a service like this one. I do certainly not consider the risk of low quality drawn out debate to be worth missing out on replies.

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> It find it would be impossible to maintain a useful discussion that lasts longer than just a few hours without it.

What’s wrong with https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alkonaut? (Where the “threads” link in your top bar leads.) It doesn’t show discussions from weeks ago on the first page, but it does show a couple of days worth at the moment.

If you post frequently enough you’ll start getting responses on comments from page two or three of that list, which you might miss otherwise.

That’s the alternative. But I don’t want to poll that page every 15 minutes. A notification is better.

I guess the convenience comparison depends on how the notification is received and how you browse HN. In my system the worst common scenario involves me viewing a different “workspace” than my browser with the page not open in it, requiring a 2 key chord (Super + 9) to go to the dwm tag where luakit lives and 3 more keypresses (g n t) to go in a new tab to my HN threads quickmark, [Edit:] and at my typing speed of 75 wpm | 6.25 characters per second, it takes about ⅘ of a second + page load time to check, and leaves me at a page full of links to the replies and their context.

Thanks - I didn't know this existed (I now realize that I didn't even bother to check if the "hnreplies" name has been used already..)

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