Hi everyone. There used to be a site that did this, but it disappeared a few months ago, so I made HN Replies last night to fill the void.
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:
You rock Dan! I just posted to Ask HN recently asking if there was a replacement when I noticed it go down and got crickets. Thanks for taking the initiative. You should let Jacques know so he can update his HN FAQ.
On a side note, any idea why YC doesn't bake this into the HN site itself? Dang, any comment?
What does the plain-text notification look like? I'd guess that Hacker News probably has a pretty high proportion of users whose MUA of choice is mutt or Emacs+something.
It doesn't seem to parse links correctly in the body of the comment, but I appreciate what works so far. It's pretty much exactly what I want, and fills one of the few missing points of Hacker News.
Wouldn't this just have the same problem as the previous site? The functionality for this tool seems better implemented as a Chromium or Firefox plugin rather than a service.
What were the problems with the previous site? I used it without major problems.
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.
Major problem with it going offline, hence this new tool, which may or may not go offline at some point again. 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.
> Major problem with it going offline, hence this new tool, which may or may not go offline at some point again.
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.
Which is a distinction I don't think really matters. They have an agreement, and firebase provides the API, but that agreement could become strained or need to be renegotiated if there's a feeling that the HN API is taking more resources than it's worth, or if HN pays directly for usage, then we're back at it affecting HN again.
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.
Well in a browser extension, you wouldn't necessarily have a lot of people grabbing the comment history. The program could still run as it does, calling the HN API every ten minutes for new replies. The browser extension could just call the service to see if it has found any new replies for you particularly.
Thanks for writing it. I seriously was getting tired of looking for replies. I was about to write one myself within the week. Might still do it to experiment with a new language. Thanks still.
You just check the comments feed occasionally, and make sure you follow it back far enough until you've found a comment you've previously seen (or a time prior to the last seen comment). Of those comments, if any are for users that have requested notification, shoot off an email to their supplied notification email address with the relevant info.
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.
Come on now. I'm sure the commenter knew you could search the subscriber list when new comments come in. I think the real interest was in how Grossman may have optimized it for CPU or memory efficiency. I was curious myself given it's easier to keep sites like this up if they take almost no resources to run. Some low-power, disposable box or extra CPU cycles on an existing server.
"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.
> Come on now. I'm sure the commenter knew you could search the subscriber list when new comments come in.
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.
account -> email mapping isn't necessarily public, the email hosts transiting the email don't need that information leaked. it's about preventing info flow.
Yes, but even if HN knows you by me@example.com, and this fact does not leak, something else does: someone (probably you) is interested at getting replies to your comments at krapp@example.com. Deduction: that is one of your email addresses.
This is pretty cool for those who would use it. I for one, do not want more notifications in my life. :) Even my iPhone doesn't notify me on anything besides calls and texts. Everything else is at my convenience.
I used to be like this until I unsub'd from basically every single unimportant email I was getting.
I created a casual email that I use with no notifications that I check every once in a while. My main email has notifications and if I get one I know it's important.
I am confused because if only text and calls notifications are allowed then an HN mail for a comment shouldn't be a problem. Unless the mail box is `clear' from notifications as well and GP wants to keep it that way.
I use the Gmail app on my phone, but it's blocked from notifying me. I open it up when I want to see my emails. Which I check often enough each day anyway, but I get to do it without interruption and no downtime.
The OPs screenshot[0] wasn't clear to me if that was a native browser notification or email popup. I check for new responses whenever I click on a new interesting HN post in my Firefox bookmarks toolbar RSS feed. While another email sitting there waiting defeats the purpose for me. In general my philosophy is lazy eval over eager eval, so to speak.
I, too, was using HN Notify until it suddenly just stopped working. It came back briefly before it disappeared again.
I wish this functionality ought to be built into HN, though. A lot of discussions seem to be die off very quickly, and my hypothesis is that many commenters just don't bother/remember to check back for replies.
It's a trade-off. Having to manually look for replies means that people are less likely to end up in back-and-forths defending their honor on the internet.
I'd say most comments don't warrant a response. Everyone shared their thoughts, here are some different opinions, we move on.
It would be kinda nice if this was built into HN, but I also kind of like how minimal HN is. Maybe the best solution is to centralize all of the myriad extensions that people have made for HN, so that anyone can easily find the features they want to add to their HN experience.
I think comment notifications is sufficiently core that it should be an official feature.
Letting the community solve thing externally to HN is well and good, but results in exactly this situation, where a lot of users relied on one user's system when it was abruptly taken offline.
It provided a convenience that, in my case, significantly improved my HN experience (and others', too, since it kept certain conversations alive that otherwise would have faded earlier), an improvement which was then equally subtracted when the service disappeared.
I'd love HN to be community-extensible, though. Current browser extensions are great (I use this [1], which adds thread collapsing and highlights unread comments), but need to be maintained across browsers and typically don't work on mobile.
A better solution would be to allow users to add scripts to their account, which could then be copied into a static location (so the author can't change the code to something disruptive) and inserted into the page body. Then a nice little ecosystem could grow where users shared useful extensions.
As an example of a personal need currenty unfulfilled: I recognize a few HN names, but most I just forget. Each thread is full of anonymous people who I've surely read, and maybe replied to, before. It'd be wonderful to get something (Gravatar icons, expand to full name, unique colorization, "previously replied to person" or "previously upvoted" indicator) for each name to make them easier to remember and recognize, even within a single thread. It's also be great to show company names next to user names.
I agree with pretty much all that you're saying (I like the hosted scripts idea a lot). However, I can't help but wonder whether HN should care about all this. Does the lack of these features (which, I argue, is about convenience) really hurt the community? Or is it a filter such that only high-quality users will be motivated to trudge on through all the inconvenience?
Given that HN is (probably?) not a revenue source for YC, these kinds of feature wishlists have very different implications, and the relationship between YC and HN users is very different than it would be for reddit/online communities.
As someone who uses HN every day, I would say that usability concerns are as valid for HN as they are for any other site.
Whether it's a priority for YC, well — considering the lo-fi implementation (not sure if it's a myth or if Paul Graham truly intended this as a strategy to avoid attracting the great unwashed as some people have claimed), probably not.
This is a smart way to build a list of HN users and their email addresses. My question is what will you do with this information? The sign up page makes no promises that it won't be sold or used for marketing.
I could sign up to get email notifications for replies to your HN account or any other. Though it's a good point that in the majority of cases, it'll be the account owner signing up.
I wonder. Considering it would be easy for HN maintainer to implement this feature I came to the conclusion they considered it and chose not to go with it. Maybe because that would somehow degrade the HN experience. Maybe that would shape a `quick-reply-on-the-spot' tendency instead of people getting back to the comments a few hours later to check out if the conversation brought new insights. A mean to keep some kind of posters from over posting.
The most addictive notification is "someone replied to you"... you want to see what it is, and then you often wind up replying.
So it will lead to more replies from people acting on impulse and arguing.
When you agree with something, you share it. When you disagree, you comment. So thus we can measure how popular and controversial something is by how many shares and comments it has (horizontal and vertical).
I think the way reddit does it is great. A red number in the header if you have replies and then an unread page where you can see them and click for context.
That's funny. The reason I comment here more than Reddit is because I get no notifications. On Reddit I click `disable Inbox replies` as much as possible, but sometimes forget. I like being able to look at my comments when I want to reply.
If you don't mind losing private messages (I get ~0 of those), presumably you could add the reddit mail icon to your adblocker or something?
For me though, notifications are much more important on reddit than here. Here I can see replies directly on my user page (and replies to them, which I also like to follow), there I'd have to click through to each of my recent comments to check.
Thank you! I realized the old one disappeared silently a while ago, and I guess i was just sort of hoping one would re-appear. I have two somewhat small gripes:
- No https
- Loading hnreplies.com causes my browser to load (and leak data to) 5 3rd party domains for various JS and stuff. None of that JS appears to be required for operation of the site (I had it all blocked and it seems to have subscribed me just fine)
Very nice. I do hope you'll put some wording about not selling out our addresses to everyone :)
On that note, it would actually be rather interesting to see if you could actually sell classified text ads (no tracking images) to send with the e-mails. It might be a nice little way to pay for the service in a pretty basic manner.
I'm not going to do anything with the e-mails except send reply notifications. I don't need to make any money from this, it doesn't cost anything to run.
I didn't know about HN Notify, but I welocme this. I missed so many comment replies because I simply didn't bother to check. Now I'll sit by the email machine like a teenager and wait for a reply to test this thing out :)
I've been looking for a service like this for a long time. I've set it up there to look for any keywords on "Ireland" or "Irish" as I can relate to that news a bit more because thats where I live.
That's not a use case I'd considered, but I suppose it could.
It grew out of wanting to be informed about any links related to a book I was writing (on 'docker'). Friends have used it eg to be informed about any 'rust' related posts.
Would it also be possible to post a reply to the email as a comment? Does the HN API allow for something like that to be built (with proper authentication)?
There are multiple people in this thread asking about email privacy policy. One asks about what assures that the list won't be sold. But one just asks what should happen if you get too many genuine replies.
I think it's pretty crazy that GMail, from my main account, doesn't let me just make a high-entropy word (buffalowafflesloth) and a tag, so that that email is instantly associated with the tag on my end. It should take me literally 2 clicks to write "hackernews notificaitn" and receive "buffalowafflesloth" in response, meaning anything sent to "buffalowafflesloth" gets to my main email with the "hackernews notificaitn" tag. (And I would give this service "buffalowafflesloth@gmail.com")
Google: if you're reading this do this. Let us give out emails that get a tag, so that later we can redirect it. You already kind-of do this with +SOMETHING but the +SOMETHING part can be removed to get the original email.
I think you overestimate the desire to screen email addresses and remove any "tags" that are on them. Most spammers and even companies don't even care WHAT the email is, as long as it doesn't bounce.
This is an insecure solution that doesn't scale, and only works because nobody uses it.
I don't need to lock my door either, but that kind of security doesn't scale. I either use mailinator for throwaway email signups, or I have a spam gmail account.
But I'm not going to give out my main account+marker if I expect to want to be able to undo sharing my email in the future at some point that I try to follow an unsubscribe link and it doesn't work, or because my email might get sold: that's just downright silly. You think the kind of people that would sell email lists wouldn't run a regex to strip +spam markers from gmail accounts?
You literally have to apply a one-line regex to do that. It's security by obscurity. Anyone working at google should understand that.
+whatever is a valid email address, and just because Gmail automatically creates a "tagable" feature with it, doesn't mean Joe Blow can't have joe+blow@example.com be a REAL address that if you strip +blow from, it'll still be delivered to him.
everything I wrote applies only and specifically to gmail. it would be trivial to strip the +'s from every gmail address to get right into the person's main inbox.
If I don't trust a person to stop spamming me or sell my email address then I'm not going to trust a person not to do that.
> I don't know why you said that. Gmail addresses can't have +'s in them
I was saying that regarding to automatically stripping out +string from the email to thwart this. Gmail uses them as a special character, but it is a valid email character, along with all these http://stackoverflow.com/a/2049510
All right, but I was referring to automatically stripping out +string from emails at gmail's domain (which loads of people use, including me.) So we're talking past each other and it's not a valid reason why gmail shouldn't implement this. but thanks.
thanks but I'd like google to do it. literally you/they just need to associate the string "myrealemailthatIwanttoseeeverythingat+spammymarker" with the string "cactusalligatorfortnight" so I can give out the later and it will act as the former does right now, with the relationship between the two strings being a secret. That's Google's job, not mine.
but if you think security by obscurity is enough that I should use a solution that instantly stops working once lots of people use it, then more power to you. I'm not going to do that.
also I use gmail because I don't run my own mailserver. I'm not about to start coding.
HN's API was on the fritz in the first hour or so after I posted, leading to a bunch of missed comments that weren't alerted or tracked for replies. Seems to be working great since. 475 notifications sent so far, and you should get one for this comment.
I had created a SPA for doing this using javascript in browser itself. Anyone can use it directly from browser. This is actually a part of an angular app I made sometime back.
It has watchers for an HN thread, a reddit post or comment and it can even watch multiple reddit inboxes if you run a small python script locally.
Here [1], just enter the thread id to watch for any replies under that thread
Never, ever, ever reply to replies. It's a no-win. Your reply, no matter how eloquently written, no matter how correct, can not change anyone's opinions. At best, you spend a lot of time writing an essay in reply to comments which will be ignored. At worst, the community decides you are wrong and pummels your opinion into the ground, damaging your reputation or worse. So replies have at best, near zero or worse, negative value.
Top-level comments are okay, but they should be written well enough to stand on it's own, without further clarification. It's not worth the time, mental energy and stress to reply for the tiny value comment replies offer.
If someone has a serious question, private forums (email, chat) are universally better. Comment chains lose all context and worse, stick around forever.
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:
http://i.imgur.com/f8jaAm8.png