I hope not; it seems woefully inefficient. Hopefully, there is a smarter, simpler way to do this.
Why receiving some non-sensual comments in a random time of a day do you consider efficient? Don't you have a life with more important events than some random dude's comment? Every time you are receiving the beep you are inevitably losing some context, maybe even get thrown off from "a stream".
For me reading HN is OK only before and after work, not instead. Maybe I would like to read some reactions to my ancient comments and I do not know where I have aquired additional +10 karma points over the last night, but theese are so unimportant things in my life that I will not lose anything if I dot't see it eventually.
It's inefficient on purpose, as otherwise it's easier to get into flame-wars, or something like that (paraphrased from a dang/pg comment somewhere, sometime).
Personally I just check the /threads page whenever I have time, and check for new comments. Sometimes I spot new replies to my comments because I come back to the whole comment section of a interesting submission to check in on other ongoing discussions.
Yes.
I hope not; it seems woefully inefficient.
It's that way by design, as I understand it. Pg wasn't trying to create a traditional discussion forum when he built HN and from what I can recall reading/hearing, he intentionally did not implement reply notifications and suchlike.
That said, there have been various 3rd party "HN notifier" services over the years, like hnnotify.com (or something like that) and hnreply.com (or similar). Not sure if any of those are still up and running or not though.
I have this extension that highlights any new comments, which makes it a lot easier. https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news
An unrelated tip, an official Gmail bot exists in Telegram for those who want to declutter ads and stuff - https://t.me/gmailbot
Unfortunately, it goes radio silent on recursively discussed replies between any other people who took heated debate under your reply.
I hope there is also a ChatGPT service which summarizes each HN comment with its own input and backing up with citation of its criticism/opinion. That makes spirit of HN eat magic mushrooms and steroids. To avoid it being an intrusive eye-sore, we should hover over a symbol at the end of each comment which pops up those paragraphs.
I can only imagine!