

What's the best way to stay in a conversation on Hacker News once you've commented? - kortina

Is there a way to subscribe to a convo via email or RSS, or do you just constantly have to come back to check for replies?<p>If (as it seems) there's not a way to subscribe to push notifications once you've joined a conversation, does anyone know if this is deliberate, or just something that hasn't yet been implemented. If it's the latter, I vote for setting this up ASAP. I'd love to be able to subscribe to Hacker News convos via email.
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petercooper
Write a little script that pulls
[http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<username>](http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<username>);
and does some magic to pull out the info into an RSS feed _(yes, ideally pg
can add this as a real feature, but I'm being pragmatic here ;-))._

Just a messy Ruby-based example I threw together. Works for me.

    
    
      require 'rubygems'
      require 'open-uri'
      require 'hpricot'
      
      username = 'petercooper'
      uri = 'http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=' + username
      doc = Hpricot(open(uri))
      
      puts %{<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
      <rss version="2.0">
      <channel>
      <title>Hacker News responses to #{username}</title>
      <link>#{uri}</link>}
      
      (doc/'td td table').each do |post|
        content = post.inner_html
        next if content =~ />#{username}</       # skip if we posted it
        next unless post.inner_html =~ /vote/    # skip if it's not a post
        id = content[/\_(\d+)/,1]
        comment_text = (post/'.comment').first.inner_text
        commenter = content[/user\?id=(\w+)/,1]
        puts %{  <item>\n    <title>Comment from #{commenter}</title>}
        puts %{    <link>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=#{id}</link>}
        puts %{    <description>#{comment_text}</description>\n  </item>}
      end
      
      puts %{</channel></rss>}
    

It'd be better, but the HTML on Hacker News is from 1996. I was too sloppy to
bother fetching the title of the current thread ;-)

With just adding a shebang line and a content-type header line, it works no
problems on Dreamhost as a CGI script. Example:
<http://bigbold.dreamhosters.com/hnc.cgi>

Anyway, thanks for giving me the idea. I'm using that now myself.. lol.

~~~
jamesheroku
Nice work Peter. I wrapped this in two lines of Sinatra and deployed it to
Heroku, so anyone can get an RSS feed for their username:
<http://hackernews.heroku.com/username>

Code is here: <http://github.com/jnl/hackernews-thread-rss>

~~~
dreeves
Holy crap, that's handy! Thanks so much!

Out of curiosity (and in hopes of eliciting a reply to see if it shows up in
my new Hacker News Responses feed!) would this also be easy to do with
Yahoo!Pipes?

~~~
petercooper
I wondered about that. I've been using Pipes a little lately but am no expert.
I'm not sure if Pipes can deal with operations upon non organized content. You
could probably use a service like Feed43 first though.

------
avantbard
I wrote a silly little Rails app one weekend to help me with problems like
this.

<http://SeeURLater.com>

You add a bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks toolbar, then whenever you're
on a page that you want to remember to revisit later, you use the bookmarklet
which fires up a little popup window, delicious style, that lets you save the
URL. Each night you get one email message with all the links you added the
previous day, reminding you to revisit them. No links added? No email the next
day.

It's stupid simple, and very minimalist right now, but it's been working for
me, and you're all welcome to use it. =-)

------
aneesh
_Is there a way to subscribe to a convo via email or RSS, or do you just
constantly have to come back to check for replies?_

There's not really a good way. You just check back every so often, and even
then, there's not a good way to view the comments that have been newly added.
This has been discussed here before, but HN deliberately tries to keep things
simple, so I wouldn't bet on this feature being added anytime soon.

~~~
aditya
There is that 'threads' link
([http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<userid>](http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<userid>))
on the top menu which takes you to your latest comment threads, works pretty
well for me. :) No way to get this into email/RSS, though.

~~~
aneesh
Yep, that's pretty useful, but it only shows replies to your comments, and not
other comments on the same article.

------
swombat
I mostly use the "threads" view, and sometimes click on the story title to see
whether someone has added a new interesting comment there.

It's a shame there's no way to visually identify new comments, though. When I
post up an article and I'm interested in _all_ the comments, after it goes
past 50 or so it becomes very hard to track new comments.

