
Show HN: HNNotify – Get emailed when a users reply to your HN Posts and Comments - jermaustin1
https://hnnotify.xyz/
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meritt
Dan Grossman's [http://hnreplies.com/](http://hnreplies.com/) still works

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petercooper
Can confirm. Get mail from it frequently. It just works. Open to new options
though :)

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ColinWright
There used to be [http://hnnotify.com](http://hnnotify.com) \- but that seems
to have expired. I'm guessing you already searched for other options before
building your own?

For example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6499036](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6499036)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3004254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3004254)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837059)

Those discussions mention some legitimate concerns about a service like this
that you might want to consider.

It has also gone down before:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521491)

No idea if the current outage is permanent - did you ask them?

Are you offering any long-term guarantees of existence?

Other questions:

Can I sign up to watch _other_ people's usernames?

What happens if two people sign up each to watch username "X" \- is that
detected?

Can I sign up person X to watch person Y? (This won't happen if a confirmation
email is send)

What happens if every second I sign up person X to watch person Y - does
person X get a confirmation request every time?

I'm sure there are other questions, and I'm sure you've thought of them all
and have answers - you might want to create a FAQ to cover them.

And kudos for producing something and making it available!

 _Edit: Now registered and gone through the process - am I supposed to get a
blank screen when I "verify" my registration?_

 _Edit 2: A forced reload gave me the "success" message, but I see no way to
unsubscribe._

 _Edit 3: <fx: Cue laughter /> \- this comment is being downvoted. Thanks HN,
I needed the dose of reality._

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jermaustin1
> am I supposed to get a blank screen when I "verify" my registration?

No. That is the white screen of death meaning there was an error pulling your
user account from HN. I went in and clicked it for you, and it worked. HN API
issues are pretty rare.

I was aware tangentially of HNNotify.com, and tried to buy the domain, but
they wanted $1,000. I never used the service, because until about a year ago,
I didn't really use HN all that often.

> Are you offering any long-term guarantees of existence?

My guarantee of HNNotify.xyz existing for no into infinity is that it costs my
company < $20/mo to run, so it will take more time to shut it down than it
costs to run. We get $450/mo of free azure hosting for the next two years,
then after that the all in cost is $80/mo.

> Can I sign up to watch other people's usernames?

This is planned in the short-term. The user (if registered on HNNotify) will
get notified they are being followed.

> What happens if two people sign up each to watch username "X" \- is that
> detected?

You have to verify ownership of the account, so it isn't prevented. It is
useful if you change emails, etc.

> you might want to create a FAQ to cover them.

That's a good idea. I'll try and type some of these things up.

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ColinWright
Thanks.

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jermaustin1
Hey guys, I built this out of a desire to get emailed when people respond to
me on HN. Too often I would comment, go out to dinner and forget to check
back. Now, I will know within an hour or so if someone commented!

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lobster_johnson
I use hnreplies.com, and it works pretty well. But it goes through periods of
not working at all.

The problem with these services (there also used to be one called
hnnotify.com, which didn't last long) is that they're developed by HN users,
who don't seem to care enough to keep the services working 100%.

YC seems to prefer a development model where the community fills in the gaps
of missing functionality, but this also means you can't expect much from the
resulting services. I would much rather have this built into HN.

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azhenley
I'd prefer it to be builtin too. Just a number beside my username in the top
right, that when clicked, takes me to a list of comments and submissions that
have been commented on.

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morganvachon
> _" I'd prefer it to be builtin too"_

Same, I can see all sorts of nefarious uses for this service (not necessarily
by the guy who built it, more so by trolls who can use it to target HN users).
If I really need something like this, I'm competent enough to build and host
it privately for my own use. Given I'm not even a programmer by trade, I'm
sure that last statement is even more true for the majority of users here.

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kinkrtyavimoodh
Everytime an improvement to HN is posted here, I find it funny that HN is
frequently cited on HN as an example of a perfect clean minimalist website
when it lacks plenty of features.

Yes, a blank page is also very clean and minimalist. And useless.

P.S. I know that plenty of text-only websites load themselves with tons of
useless media and needless JS. And yes that should be fixed. But the internet
is more than just blogs.

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harigov
I second this. Forget fancy bells and whistles, this website is missing some
very core and useful functionalities that aren't so hard to implement.

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singularity2001
I often wonder whether these basic features are missing intentionally for not
so benign reasons

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acct1771
Yes.

Compare the speed and fury of flamewars on reddit when people are tossing
orangereds back and forth.

Yes, it's annoying to me to have to dig back through my profile (whichever it
may be at the time) - but I find I will only do so when a topic is truly worth
following up on - not simply to spite another stranger on the internet, which
seemingly still goes on here to some extent regardless of the "feature".

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anowlcalledjosh
Is there a way to unsubscribe? I can't see an unsubscribe link in the emails,
and there doesn't seem to be one on the website.

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jermaustin1
Good question, currently, no. I will see what options mailgun gives me.

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jermaustin1
There is apparently a checkbox to autmatically insert an unsub link. I will
see what this looks like.

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anowlcalledjosh
LGTM :)

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tw1010
I love it! But why would you need to verify that your email is associated to
your username? What if you'd want to stay anonymous and not let whoever
created the app know your private contact information?

The information is out there for the public anyway, I don't see an issue with
following someone else's username if that is the reason. And if the reason is
to prevent other people from signing up random people to get spammed with
notifications, or because the service will only handle one email per username,
why not use email verification instead of username verification?

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jermaustin1
Because there are additional features coming soon: following users - and
notifying a person they are being followed, subscribing to
topics/websites/etc.

Following a user and them being notified requires a hacker news username to be
verified, so we aren't sending out 40 emails that "tw1010 is being followed by
jermaustin1" when the only person who cares would be the real tw1010.

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gremlinsinc
I thought about building a hckrnews.com clone with this built in, and maybe a
mobile app. It'd be nice to get sms/email/push notifications as an option, but
not it all be a separate application altogether.

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azhenley
Let me know if you build the mobile app!

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matte_black
Is this really all that desirable? Hackernews takes up way too much of my time
as it is, and I get people replying to my posts all the time. Seems like this
would quickly lead to notification hell.

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1123581321
Notifications are nice for us less popular users. :)

And they are useful when one has made a personal offer to another user. The
acceptance of that offer could easily be missed, especially if it occurs days
later.

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nasredin
Regarding .XYZ TLD:

Please don't use XYZ.

Reason:

It's 99.9% full of crap (SEO spam, malware, etc.)

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nukeop
There are drug dealers living in New York City, does that mean that everyone
else should move out?

It's just a tld, there's a million of those. If somebody likes it, why
shouldn't they use it? The .cx domain was ruined by one rogue website and the
attitude you encourage.

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codesternews
May I know what is your approach. Are you periodically checking
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments](https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments)
or what you do to find user and its reply. Just asking out of curiosity.

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jermaustin1
Using the API, and every hour crawling a users posts that are < 10 days old
for new comments.

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frgtpsswrdlame
Hmm, I like that you're not sure whether someone has replied to you.

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ColinWright
Then don't use it?

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ezekg
I've been using [https://www.hnwatcher.com/](https://www.hnwatcher.com/) for
awhile and really like the keyword alerts the most.

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dingo_bat
Is there a way to specify active hours or time zone? Seems like there are no
notifications during my day, and a lot of them in the dead of the night. I am
in India (UTC+0530).

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jermaustin1
Notifications come in every hour that you have a reply. Nothing exists to
schedule them for daytime hours only.

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azhenley
I've been using this for about a week now. It's exactly what I was looking
for: a simple notification that reminds me to go read my comments.

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andy_ppp
I sometimes think it's a shame Hacker News isn't an independent startup
separate from YC (or rather has to at some point turn a profit so motives for
it to improve are there).

I know the MOOC is coming (?) but there are lots of things you could do with
the social graph or even providing an Oauth API where you can have
applications that access the interactions you have on here.

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mherrmann
Congrats on the launch Jeremy! This is a feature I've been wanting for ages. I
subscribed.

\- Michael from fman

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jermaustin1
Thanks buddy. I was actually writing you an email this morning, but then
decided I had tested it enough :).

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mherrmann
Haha! Fair enough. Would have been cool. Fingers crossed!

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bg0
The verify is getting a runtime error

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jermaustin1
Looks like your profile's about section is null. I expected an empty string.
In either case, you need to add the verification code to your profile and save
it before you can verify your HN Notify account.

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bg0
For what it's worth I had the code in there when I clicked verify and received
the error. Glad to help with some error handling though :)

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jermaustin1
It has happened to a couple of people so far, seems like the API might have a
little bit of a lag when updating a profile.

I haven't seen it first hand but what you and a couple others are see sounds
like it might be the case. I'll keep an eye out.

Thanks!

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neom
Thank you. :)

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nimbius
i wonder if theres a way to implement this in bash as a cron job. no reference
to a github...

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jermaustin1
Definitely possible. I am a windows developer by trade though, so I used a
windows service that is always running looking for new content then queuing it
up for the email notification.

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singularity2001
email? why not web notifications?

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Cyberdog
I would prefer web notifications as well, though I understand email is
probably easier to implement. Still, were the option there, I would have
signed up to use this already.

