
Ask HN: Is there HN App that will notice me on new reply to my comment? - finchisko
Literally HN Reader is like todomvc app, there so many HN Reader apps.<p>But I didn&#x27;t found any that will take advantage of push notifications to notify me about new replies to my comment. Do you guys know any? Also I would like to know which one are u using and why? Thanks.
======
polygot
I just whipped up a super hacky Python 2 script which will notify you if
someone replies to your comment, without requiring your email, and can be self
hosted (fill in your HN username in the variable):
[https://gist.github.com/Decagon/1ef31011d05bf71aa5570f2bddda...](https://gist.github.com/Decagon/1ef31011d05bf71aa5570f2bddda41c4)

Just run it with: while true; do python HNgetCommentReplies.py | mail -s "new
hn reply" me@example.com; sleep 1m; done;

(e.g. check every minute for new comment replies and mail output.) It will
output "Reply to comment: hn-url" if there is a reply, otherwise it will
output nothing. Unfortunately it doesn't save any state, so it doesn't know if
it already emailed you a reply. This can be easily fixed but I don't have too
much time right now. Also, it makes one query at a time, which is a bit slow
(as it takes around 20 seconds to check for replies.) This can be parallelized
to make it much faster.

Benefits of this script is that if it were centralized, n users could be
subscribed to get notifications (e.g. a million users) it would only use one
query to the hacker news server every 30 seconds or so. It just looks to see
if all recent comments have a parent whose name matches yours.

I'll dogfood it for a while and see if any replies to this comment works.

~~~
loa_in_
" sanity check sample response\

~~~
polygot
Sample check response confirmed--but I think I have to fix something

------
ddorian43
I use/like [http://www.hnreplies.com/](http://www.hnreplies.com/)

~~~
craftyguy
Hmm, no privacy policy?

~~~
wingerlang
You could ask the guy making it
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dangrossman](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dangrossman)

Personally I use it and it is awesome.

------
matt_the_bass
Great question.

I posted a related Ask HN the other day asking about who’s using the api and
for what tools:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15861468](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15861468)

Unfortunately I’m never made it to the “ask” page so it never got traction

