I check HN's API for new comments every 10 minutes, and send an e-mail notification when a new reply to one of your comments shows up. This is what the notification mail will look like:
On a side note, any idea why YC doesn't bake this into the HN site itself? Dang, any comment?
Two pretty trivial suggestions:
- Number the links in square brackets, so they're easier to follow when passed to urlview
- Quotation marks around the topic subject in the body of the email
Huh; HN Notify does seem to have gone missing. Anyone know what happened to it?
Wouldn't a browser plugin require you to actively be using HN, or at least have a tab open? Getting an email notification four hours later that someone replied to you on HN, so you may want to take a look is nice (if you don't want to be a slave to HN, don't check your email as often or don't deal immediately with this email).
Additionally, in a browser extension, there's then a lot of people grabbing the comment history rather than a single program, which necessarily puts a higher load on HN.
I'm not sure I understand this sentiment. It's a tool that provides a capability that wasn't there before, so event if it goes away later, you still get the utility it provided while it worked. Since the cost is just providing and email address, that seems a worthwhile trade to me. If it was a trade between this and some other implementation that worked, and it's possible closure at a later date would force you to set up with another service afterwards and you wouldn't if you chose the correct service in the first place, then that's a different story.
> I am sure you could build an extension that polls the HN API every couple of seconds or so to check for replies and have it show a popup when you get a notification as well as send an email.
Well, I'm not sure it would be nice to HN to query them an extra time every few seconds X the number or people that might install the extension. If it's a query every 10 seconds, and 1000 people run it, you've just increased their load by 100 queries a second.
Ultimately, the bits we consume aren't free. Someone pays for them, it just commonly not the consumer in the current model. At the point where you make the person that is paying for them feel it, then the person who pays might end up shifting to you. Or the resource goes away, and everyone loses.
I'm not saying that's likely in this case, but even if it isn't likely, doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it.
I was just about to link HN Notify for this, but sure enough, it's gone. Thanks for the replacement!
It's really not that complicated, and a great starter/hobby project. I imagine the only reason there wasn't a replacement out sooner for the prior site that stopped working is that a lot of us weren't really aware it had stopped, or weren't aware it was dead and not suspended (is it?), or hadn't yet gotten off our buts to make a replacement once we determined the prior site was gone.
It's the kind of small scope and easily defined project that's great for learning a new language.
"It's the kind of small scope and easily defined project that's great for learning a new language."
I totally agree with that. Matter of fact, I was planning on implementing that exact project to learn Rust or Go. :) Might still do it as it remains a good learning experience, esp for stuff you use 80% of the time.
Well, that may have been obvious to you, but I didn't want to assume anything about the asker, and while it appears the majority of users here are developers at times, there are still people that frequent that have little or no practical software engineering experience. In any case, it's easy to overlook features of a site you never or rarely use. I've clicked on the comments feed maybe 3-4 times in a few years, if I hadn't thought about this issue previously (as obviously you have as well), I might or might not have immediately thought about the comments link, and how it's really a feed.