HACKER Q&A
📣 alcazar

How do you keep up with replies to your posts/comments?


I've been posting stories and commenting on HN for a while now, and it's frustrating that I never know when someone replies to me.

It looks like there's no built in notification system. No emails, no alerts on the site, no replies page or anything.

So how do you all handle it? Do most people just leave tabs open and refresh them? Or bookmark your own comments and check manually every so often?

We recently found hnreplies.com which works great for replies to comments (it does email and RSS). But it doesn't cover replies to your actual posts. Is there a service that does both? Or do people use something else?

Would be good to hear how you do it. Thanks!

  👤 mmarian Accepted Answer ✓
I built https://hackernewsalerts.com for that. Think I have about 100 users. It's open source, see links on the site.
👤 rolph
comments you have made:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alcazar

postings you have submitted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alcazar

👤 saltyoldman
I have on my personal to-do list to build a firefox extension for it.
👤 vunderba
Like many HN users I've got a little bespoke app on my VPS that polls the HackerNews API and looks for responses to any of my comments/posts and then raises a toast notification on my laptop and phone.

Honestly, any reasonably modern LLM could probably crank one out for you in 10 minutes.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

👤 sph
I click the ‘threads’ button in the top bar. 15 years on here, trust me, that’s all you need.