
Apply HN: Make HN social – follow users, topics, and get notified about replies - Smirnoff
http://notify.uz
======
Smirnoff
IDEA: Hacker News is a great resource for news and interesting discussions.
However, sometimes I wish it could do a little better in some areas like
reading on mobile, sending notifications about replies, and perhaps having
more social features.

We decided to take a different look at HN and build a feed with notifications
for HN users, which will notify about the following items:

\- When a user you follow comments on Hacker News (e.g. ptacek, patio11, dang)

\- When someone responds to your comments (I've missed a response from kevin
once :(. This could've helped)

\- When someone posts a topic/keyword, which you follow and it gains
popularity (e.g. "lisp", "scheme")

TEAM and COMMITMENT: We are 4 guys residing in Uzbekistan -- all working on
the same startup. We'd like to think we are smart -- 3/4 of us got full rides
to study at UMBC/UPenn/Hertfordshire. We are committed to succeed -- as a
team, but not necessarily with this or some other idea. In the past we worked
at Morgan Stanley, Western Union, and created apps for others.

WHY HN APPLY: This as an experiment. So far we have an idea and an Android
prototype. We invested 4 days of work. If we are picked, we will pursue this
full time over the summer and ship weekly builds.

We need your feedback on this. I am sure some people won't need it because it
will ruin the simplicity of HN but, perhaps, as power users you need some
other features and use-cases. Let us know.

PS: As Hacker News API is very limited, we have to do lots of work to build
our own API from ground up to add rich set of API. Sorry if things break -- we
only spent a couple of days on this.

~~~
jbob2000
I don't like it. Hacker news is nice right now because it doesn't have all the
crap you want to add. I don't want this site to turn into a "social media
game" like reddit. I like that the power users feel limited, it keeps them
inline with 98% of the other users here.

~~~
gr3yh47
specifically comment reply notifications would be a very welcome feature. It's
annoying to manually track discussions as an active user.

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DanBC
There's a risk it promotes flamewars. I'm not sure how to tackle that? Maybe a
built in delay bofre accepting replies on notified messages?

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krapp
I would argue the new comments page promotes flamewars as well, probably
moreso than notifications would, since it shows potentially _every_ troll
comment. It just begs people to engage in tangential, out-of-context
commenting and drive-by voting.

The obvious, direct way to deal with it would be to just accept the risk and
moderate as usual. There are already plenty of flame-retardant features here,
I don't know that we would need more.

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Matt3o12_
Since you're probably using a backend for checking if somebody replied to your
comment (and don't do it in your app because that would be slow and battle
draining) do you consider adding email notifications? I'm not really
interested in a new hacker news app – the one I'm currently using is just
fine.

Email notifications could be invaluable, though.

~~~
dangrossman
I made [http://hnreplies.com](http://hnreplies.com) which is just e-mail
notifications for comment replies.

~~~
stared
Thank you - you made my "valuable interactions on HN"/"procrastination on HN"
ratio much higher! :)

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onion2k
I made a Chrome plugin to do this...
[http://imgur.com/xQ9bzyi](http://imgur.com/xQ9bzyi) It let's you 'follow'
people, tag them with keywords, easily look up profiles. It parses out
interesting things (keybase, twitter, email, etc) too. The fun bit is the
tagging - it syncs tags using firebase so it's delightfully collaborative. Or
it would be if it had more than one user. Like many, many side projects, it's
unfinished and on hold while I work on other things. I plan on finishing it,
but if someone (you guys...) makes something that works then that'd be
awesome.

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moeamaya
This is a huge pain point when initially developing web applications—spinning
up redis instance, pub/sub, dirtying up models/controllers. I mean even
facebook struuugggled with their +1 notification bug for years.

If you can somehow normalize and create systematic best practices for
notifications, this could be a very large SaaS product.

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Geekette
This would be very useful. It'd be great if accessible via desktop not just
mobile. It would be cool if it ultimately ended up being incorporated into the
main HN site. Not sure why the opprobrium against it - it's a fully optional
addition to one's use of HN.

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ecesena
BTW, does anyone know what happened to hn notify via email? It seems it has
stop to work for me, but I really need something around replies to my
comments.

~~~
gr3yh47
comment reply notifications is by far the largest gaping hole in HN
functionality imo.

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abhi3
While this is a very cool idea, how to you intend to make money? I would
assume YC would object/revoke API access if you tried to monetize their
content.

From the YFC eligibility FAQ:

 _Can non-profits apply? Sorry, we’re not accepting non-profits for this
experiment. If the experiment goes well though, we hope to fund some in the
future._

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
Smirnoff
abhi3, thanks for your question. While we will give this product away for free
to HN users, we plan to monetize the technology behind this in near future.

One of the uses of our notification system is to notify users about certain
keywords in the articles. Let's say you study for GRE and you need to memorize
1000 words. Currently, you can study with flash cards but ideally you need to
read New York Times, Washington Post, Nautilus, Economist to really see the
words in sentences.

What if we could notify you when certain keywords appear in these articles? I
bet you would love to keep track of these words and with notifications you
will only read newest articles. I hope some people would pay for such usage.

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nikolay
Have an Android app that notifies me via an SMS; this makes no sense!

~~~
Smirnoff
Thanks for feedback Nikolay. We wanted to add many things. Notifications via
SMS is for super busy people, who go offline from time to time but would never
want to miss a reply from pg.

Also, we are considering adding a Telegram bot for notifications. Please let
us know if someone would like this.

EDIT: I can't reply to posts below, so I am going to post here. The android
notifications are default. On top of that we would like to offer other types
of notifications: SMS, Email, Telegram bots, etc.

~~~
jchendy
I assume nikolay would prefer native Android notifications.

~~~
nikolay
True. Plus, I can't miss native notifications thanks to Notif Log Pro [0].

[0]:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dvdh.notif...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dvdh.notiflog.full&hl=en)

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jaflo
Never seen the .uz CCTLD. Turns out it's from Uzbekistan. Does anyone know
where a foreigner could buy one? Or how difficult is it to purchase?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uz)

~~~
diyor
Have a look at this website - [http://cctld.uz/reg/](http://cctld.uz/reg/)

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calcsam
Really like the idea! Wish it was a website as well as an app.

~~~
Smirnoff
Thanks! This was a weekend project, so we couldn't get it done in time. We
have got a few things started :)

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wickedOne
not sure whether this is a good idea…

limiting your news aggregation by following a few (preferred) people makes me
wonder whether you'd not better share your email address and start a cozy
conversation.

i'm aware this app is for those interested and those who don't can continue to
use hackernews as they're used to, but i fail to see the added value of making
it "social"…

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abhi3
How come you guys didn't make the runoff?

~~~
Smirnoff
Because discussion was not substantive enough.

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dilap
looks awesome, ios version plz! :)

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sabuj
software name give me i download take

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sabuj
how to i understand call me phone: 90980450

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greenspot
Nice TLD

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sabuj
to day apply but one time call me

