Show HN: HN Notifications – Get an email when a HN story matches your criteria | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HN Notifications – Get an email when a HN story matches your criteria

hnnotifications.com

49 pointsini21 comments

Author here. Many thanks for the positive feedback!

Apparently the most requested feature is to lower the minimum score threshold. This restriction made more sense when the keywords filter was not available: A subscription with a score threshold of less than, say, 200 points (this number was fairly arbitrary), ended up in the user being literally spammed by the service -- While testing the service, I roughly estimated that a score of 100 points is equivalent to ~1.5 emails every 15 minutes. The usability, cost, and scalability of this approach is probably not ideal.

However, now that custom keywords are involved in the criteria, I do feel like the minimum score can be lowered. Perhaps even removed, if the user has selected 1+ keywords (they are optional). I'll follow up on this feature in the GitHub issue, https://github.com/ichinaski/hnnotifications/issues/2

I quite like the way this server is designed in a fashion that I can just run it myself - not requiring that I give my email address to any unknown third-party. I just took a look at the go code and its very easy to understand, very easy to build, and quite easy to deploy. Kudo's to the authors for making it open source - it means that I'm now running this locally as a service for my personal needs in finding new HN articles without much fuss! Great stuff!

Very nice idea, have subscribed.

200 for a score is much too high. Every post except one in the front page of HN has under 120, with the majority of them under 20.

For example, this submission has a score of 15 (at time of writing this comment, which was 5 hours after post submission)

Agreed. If I want the stories that score 200+ I'll just use the front page.

But when someone posted my company on hn it was on the front page for a few hours before I found out about it. Likewise, I want to know anytime someone posts something about me, my company, and a couple competitors. Those posts rarely (if ever) hit 200. I would probably use a threshold of about 10.

Not sure if that high of a threshold makes your tech possible, but it's a deal breaker for me.

Point counts vary by time. Weekends such as today see less traffic and upvotes.

The threshold you might really want is upvotes as a percentage of readership, but it's not clear whether that data is available or whether the functionality is trying to be in scope for this.

It is open source, I think I will just fork it and deploy my own.

You should add a way to preview what kind of results keyword provides.

One small thing: once you know an email address subscribed you can mailbomb it with unsubscribe links (you might want to throttle those / don't send them more than once).

Well spotted. Thanks for the feedback, I'll make sure I fix this.

I actually wrote something like this a while back for myself. I find it a pain to keep track of sites like this and reddit where it's not a linear feed, items move up and down, and you need to scan the entire homepage to check for new content. In the end I made this http://www.serializer.io as a simple tool to make it a linear feed that's easier for me to follow.

If you prefer RSS (or JSON) over email, my http://hnapp.com works well, and it's open source too.

Thank you for the link. Is there a way to have more results ?

There isn't an option to get more results per page, but you can get to the next page by clicking "next" at the bottom.

If you don't see the "next" link, then there are no more results. Note that hnapp only has data since around August 2014.

I wrote something similar but is a menu bar app for Mac, so more real time, but more annoying.

https://github.com/cnbuff410/hn-notifier

It only focuses on new post without any threshold and keyword matching, mainly because of my specific requirement.

I've needed this for so long. Thanks.

Lot of room for improvements, but still cool though. I personally use Mention (http://mention.com) to track HN posts and get those stories under 200.

This is great!

I would like to receive notifications for stories about OS X. It looks like this is currently not possible since the keywords are space-separated?

EDIT: Also please allow non-alphanumeric keywords like C++?

Keywords support is currently quite naive. This filter definitely needs to be more sophisticated. While writing the feature I just wanted to make it as simple as possible, covering the vast majority of cases with a very straightforward policy (no punctuation marks, no symbols, spaces, etc). I agree this limitation needs to be improved.

I like it, just left my email and waiting to get my first notification! Kudos to you.

Quick question : Do you search for the specified keywords in the title or in the link content ?

Thanks! The keywords are searched in the story title. The current (somewhat naive) approach simply splits the title by non letter/number characters, essentially getting rid of punctuation chars, symbols, etc

I see. Trying to detect keywords in an article could be nice improvement.

Another question, why did you limit the lower bound for the score w/ 200 ?

I assume you start indexing the HN submissions. In the long run you can create a context aware version of HN, e.g. 'Bring HN submissions with keyword X submitted during the last week.' This could be a brand new way to browse HN.

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