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Comment by sillysaurus2 | Hacker News Reader

How the hell did you become aware of their comment and write such an excellent reply in under 45min?

You're awesome.

He's the original poster of the article, in case you didn't notice. I'm sure that

a) He was expecting a comment like that, as evidenced by the "Oh boy, one of these" comment, and prepared to respond to it, and

b) He was watching for new comments on the submission.

Haha, I didn't pre-write it -- I'm just used to it.

I was in fact puzzled by this getting upvoted and not receiving any comments, so I refreshed the page a few times.

Sorry if I implied that you pre-wrote it; I meant that more along the line of "I've answered this question multiple times already, so I know more or less what to say".

No worries. I don't normally respond with as comprehensive a rebuttal, but was in a write-y mood today (and as someone who hates writing, this is not something to pass up).

Ah, I didn't notice. But now I want to write an "HN Alerts" service that notifies you whenever someone writes a comment with a certain keyword. In moot's case, that would be "4chan," but I'd imagine lots of people would find it useful.

> But now I want to write an "HN Alerts" service that notifies you whenever someone writes a comment with a certain keyword.

You should absolutely do this.

Ok. Would you email me (sillysaurus2 at gmail) so that I can have you beta test it? It's pretty straightforward, but I'd feel better if you look at it before I publicly launch it.

(I know how busy you are, so I'll always be brief.)

There's actually a useful Zapier script that already does this [0]. I remember reading about it on Mike Knoop's (Zapier cofounder) blog [1]. I haven't tried it out but you should be able to hook it up to any of the alert services that Zapier integrates with. (Which is a lot!)

[0] https://zapier.com/zapbook/webhook/rss/8249/hacker-news-ment...

[1] http://mikeknoop.com/my-zaps/

And in case there was any doubt, it's one of my favorite Zaps :)

It uses the awesome HNSearch API to poll for new mentions of phrases and triggers a Zap whenever it finds one. (I have it send me an SMS).

Here's a better, more direct Zap Template: http://zpr.io/gsjS

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