On: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode...

[sixstringtheory]

If by “consume” you mean “acquire the contents” of all those comments, well, you’ll have to read them all.

A more interesting question to me for a while has been, how to follow the evolution of a deep thread in which the time it takes to read a larger amount of comments, even more are made. How to know where all the new ones are? It’d be cool to be able to diff a thread based on timestamp.

[IPTN → sixstringtheory]

https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl does exactly that. Makes following threads so much better.

[hungryforcodes → IPTN]

You and the parent post have both interesting answers -- thanks :)