HN Explorer

Show HN: Get latest replies to an HN user (github.com)

42 points by ggerganov ↗ HN
Hi HN,

I hacked a simple service for gathering HN replies and organizing them by the parent's username.

The main idea is to be able to efficiently get the latest replies to an HN user. For example, you can use this service to send yourself notifications when some replies to you on HN.

The service queries the official HN API and can be self-hosted. It is basically ~30 lines of Bash script. I made this mostly for educational purposes -- thought you might find it useful for something.

Cheers!

Edit: for example, here are the latest replies to me [0]. It includes only recent replies, since I started the service just yesterday and it hasn't observed older replies.

[0] https://hnreplies.ggerganov.com/?u=ggerganov

18 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 49.2 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
mindcrime
In some cases this can cause a user to miss a reply in a discussion in which they had participated recently. Some users consider this to be a feature rather than a deficiency.

Yeah, I'm kinda glad HN doesn't have that. I think it helps avoid prolonged, drawn-out arguments that just go around in circles, generate animosity, and lead nowhere. Not getting notifications makes it easier to just let a conversation die out. I would put this in the "feature" category myself.

ggerganov
I completely agree - I just wondered how one would do that and wrote the Bash script. Then I tried to optimize it with C++ and finally thought - why not share.

Btw, your comment somehow didn't get detected by my service :-). First I thought I have a bug somewhere, but then I checked the result from the official HN API and for some reason it fails to return a result for the item id (30014342) of your comment [0]. Strange .. haven't seen this before.

[0] https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/30014342.json

Edit: and it just showed up -- I guess it can take some time.

daenz
Maybe they can even take it a step further and delay all comments by 3 hours. I think this could encourage people to be more thoughtful and accurate if they knew that the round trip for clarification or knee-jerk responses was not immediate.
alkonaut
I use the HN email reply notification by Dan Grossman.

http://www.hnreplies.com/

It find it would be impossible to maintain a useful discussion that lasts longer than just a few hours without it. It would be single drive-by comments without dialogue. I probably wouldn’t use HN at all if I didn’t have a service like this one. I do certainly not consider the risk of low quality drawn out debate to be worth missing out on replies.

ggerganov
Thanks - I didn't know this existed (I now realize that I didn't even bother to check if the "hnreplies" name has been used already..)
boogies
> It find it would be impossible to maintain a useful discussion that lasts longer than just a few hours without it.

What’s wrong with https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alkonaut? (Where the “threads” link in your top bar leads.) It doesn’t show discussions from weeks ago on the first page, but it does show a couple of days worth at the moment.

saagarjha
If you post frequently enough you’ll start getting responses on comments from page two or three of that list, which you might miss otherwise.
alkonaut
That’s the alternative. But I don’t want to poll that page every 15 minutes. A notification is better.
boogies
I guess the convenience comparison depends on how the notification is received and how you browse HN. In my system the worst common scenario involves me viewing a different “workspace” than my browser with the page not open in it, requiring a 2 key chord (Super + 9) to go to the dwm tag where luakit lives and 3 more keypresses (g n t) to go in a new tab to my HN threads quickmark, [Edit:] and at my typing speed of 75 wpm | 6.25 characters per second, it takes about ⅘ of a second + page load time to check, and leaves me at a page full of links to the replies and their context.
codegeek
Power of good old bash scripts. Nicely done. Of course as another poster mentioned, we have the hnreplies.com service as well. But what's the fun in that when you can hack your own :)
supperburg
I think it’s better when you have to remember to go back and check for replies. Why would you want to entertain a petty argument that you can’t even remember
livinglist
recently been working on a HN reader which includes in app notifications when users have new replies. But I’m doing this the dumb way though, I select 15 latest stories/comments posted by the user, and then fetch the content and compare to the cached one to see if there is new ‘kid’, and I do this every couple minutes: https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki