
Show HN: HN Notifications – Get an email when a HN story matches your criteria - ini
http://hnnotifications.com/
======
ini
Author here. Many thanks for the positive feedback!

Apparently the most requested feature is to lower the minimum score threshold.
This restriction made more sense when the keywords filter was not available: A
subscription with a score threshold of less than, say, 200 points (this number
was fairly arbitrary), ended up in the user being literally spammed by the
service -- While testing the service, I roughly estimated that a score of 100
points is equivalent to ~1.5 emails every 15 minutes. The usability, cost, and
scalability of this approach is probably not ideal.

However, now that custom keywords are involved in the criteria, I do feel like
the minimum score can be lowered. Perhaps even removed, if the user has
selected 1+ keywords (they are optional). I'll follow up on this feature in
the GitHub issue,
[https://github.com/ichinaski/hnnotifications/issues/2](https://github.com/ichinaski/hnnotifications/issues/2)

------
fit2rule
I quite like the way this server is designed in a fashion that I can just run
it myself - not requiring that I give my email address to any unknown third-
party. I just took a look at the go code and its very easy to understand, very
easy to build, and quite easy to deploy. Kudo's to the authors for making it
open source - it means that I'm now running this locally as a service for my
personal needs in finding new HN articles without much fuss! Great stuff!

------
chippy
Very nice idea, have subscribed.

200 for a score is much too high. Every post except one in the front page of
HN has under 120, with the majority of them under 20.

For example, this submission has a score of 15 (at time of writing this
comment, which was 5 hours after post submission)

~~~
austenallred
Agreed. If I want the stories that score 200+ I'll just use the front page.

But when someone posted my company on hn it was on the front page for a few
hours before I found out about it. Likewise, I want to know anytime someone
posts something about me, my company, and a couple competitors. Those posts
rarely (if ever) hit 200. I would probably use a threshold of about 10.

Not sure if that high of a threshold makes your tech possible, but it's a deal
breaker for me.

------
rane
You should add a way to preview what kind of results keyword provides.

------
askmike
One small thing: once you know an email address subscribed you can mailbomb it
with unsubscribe links (you might want to throttle those / don't send them
more than once).

~~~
ini
Well spotted. Thanks for the feedback, I'll make sure I fix this.

------
charlieegan3
I actually wrote something like this a while back for myself. I find it a pain
to keep track of sites like this and reddit where it's not a linear feed,
items move up and down, and you need to scan the entire homepage to check for
new content. In the end I made this
[http://www.serializer.io](http://www.serializer.io) as a simple tool to make
it a linear feed that's easier for me to follow.

------
sraquo
If you prefer RSS (or JSON) over email, my
[http://hnapp.com](http://hnapp.com) works well, and it's open source too.

~~~
tux
Thank you for the link. Is there a way to have more results ?

~~~
sraquo
There isn't an option to get more results per page, but you can get to the
next page by clicking "next" at the bottom.

If you don't see the "next" link, then there are no more results. Note that
hnapp only has data since around August 2014.

------
cnbuff410
I wrote something similar but is a menu bar app for Mac, so more real time,
but more annoying.

[https://github.com/cnbuff410/hn-notifier](https://github.com/cnbuff410/hn-
notifier)

It only focuses on new post without any threshold and keyword matching, mainly
because of my specific requirement.

~~~
EC1
I've needed this for so long. Thanks.

------
gilles_bertaux
Lot of room for improvements, but still cool though. I personally use Mention
([http://mention.com](http://mention.com)) to track HN posts and get those
stories under 200.

------
thameera
This is great!

I would like to receive notifications for stories about OS X. It looks like
this is currently not possible since the keywords are space-separated?

EDIT: Also please allow non-alphanumeric keywords like C++?

~~~
ini
Keywords support is currently quite naive. This filter definitely needs to be
more sophisticated. While writing the feature I just wanted to make it as
simple as possible, covering the vast majority of cases with a very
straightforward policy (no punctuation marks, no symbols, spaces, etc). I
agree this limitation needs to be improved.

------
onuryavuz
I like it, just left my email and waiting to get my first notification! Kudos
to you.

Quick question : Do you search for the specified keywords in the title or in
the link content ?

~~~
ini
Thanks! The keywords are searched in the story title. The current (somewhat
naive) approach simply splits the title by non letter/number characters,
essentially getting rid of punctuation chars, symbols, etc

~~~
onuryavuz
I see. Trying to detect keywords in an article could be nice improvement.

Another question, why did you limit the lower bound for the score w/ 200 ?

I assume you start indexing the HN submissions. In the long run you can create
a context aware version of HN, e.g. 'Bring HN submissions with keyword X
submitted during the last week.' This could be a brand new way to browse HN.

