Hacker News Reader

There's a great service already existing with a riff on that name, even - https://deadmanssnitch.com/

DMS is useful for stuff like crons where you're trying to monitor an event that happened rather than whether a service is online. No way to ping a cronjob from the outside world, but the cron can report that it ran successfully

Wouldn’t this allow for health checking services that don’t have public endpoints? My first thought was an alert to me that my home internet (or server) is down.

Granted I’d probably just set up a server to do that unless this was insanely cheap.

because that’s how pingdom works, and why recreate exactly what they do?

This makes it easy for internal services that maybe you don’t want to setup a publicly accessible health check ingress, would be my guess.