4 ms·

Show HN: HNswered – watches for replies to your Hacker News posts and comments

30 points by dataviz1000 6mo ago

dvt 6mo ago
At least write the README yourself, it's like 4 sentences.
- scratchyone 6mo ago
  also > A self-contained security audit prompt is available at docs/security-audit.md. lmfao
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- dataviz1000 6mo ago
  I spent at least 10 hours testing it yesterday. I got a lot of relief when the number badge incremented telling me that some commented on this post. Thank you. To me the most interesting thing is the different red team adversary agents I'm using. There is a Jony Ive design critic agent which is surprisingly very good, a red team agent that does normal code review and bug hunting by injecting logging into the code running it in isolation in the /tmp/ folder, a red team agent that code reviews and find bugs in the test harnesses, and an agent that does mutation testing by breaking the code creating regressions to make sure that the test harness catch them -- I wanted to call it the trickster agent but did didn't want to drift from training and density in the LLM model. I did a huge amount of experimentation last week discovering that if a model misses a bug or gets something wrong, running an adversary agent using the same model or family of models will not surface it. Everyone has the intuition about that but I can describe why using data. So Claude writes code that is orders of magnitude better than any project I inherited in the past 15 years and I'd have ChatGPT run all the adversaries. In order to surface replies to posts and comments it requires huge amounts requests so I needed to figure out what the optimal request rate is based on frequency of replies over time. First posts get replies after a week so there isn't any reason to surface them. After analysis, I can conclude a request every 5 minutes in the background is enough. What is that 288 (pollComments) + 144 (author-sync) = 432 requests/day per user? I spent a couple hours on that. Actually, I started with the Hacker News API and then realized that I should check the https://hn.algolia.com/api https://hn.algolia.com/api but wanted to know which is optimal including using both. After experimentation and research I discovered that ~432 requests a day at Algolia is enough.
mindcrime 6mo ago
Does anybody have a master list of all of the projects that implemented this (or something very similar) over the years? It's got to be a pretty long list by now. The weird part is, there seems to be enough demand for this that these keep popping up, but not so much that any of them ever hang around.
- dataviz1000 6mo ago
  Before starting I tried searching but I couldn't find anything. Frequently I come across comments about people wanting this feature. Here is the proof. [0] > yes please! i need a "comment to follow" functionality on HN So I built it. I built this for one user named swyx. I'm going to email him now letting him know I built it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402785
  - mindcrime 6mo ago
    There have definitely been a few over the years, especially if you include scenarios beyond just "get notified for replies". Some have been webapps, some have been browser plugins, etc. Here's some discussion of one recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21172406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21172406 And some more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42814917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42814917 And HNChat, which went a little further: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12431724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12431724 That said, don't take this as criticism. It's clearly something that some HN users want. If you can make it stick, more power to you!
  - vunderba 6mo ago
    There have been quite a few of them over the years in varying degrees of complexity. I think the most well-known one is probably HN Replies. A simple Github search returns the following results. HN Notifier https://github.com/meanands/hn-notifier https://github.com/meanands/hn-notifier Hacker New Telegram Bot https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot HN Reply Notifier https://github.com/lotsofnoise/hn-reply-notifier https://github.com/lotsofnoise/hn-reply-notifier And there have been Show HNs on them as well. Show HN: I built an open-source notification inbox widget for Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36373123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36373123 Show HN: HN Reader – Track your conversations across Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240221 I (and probably a lot of other HN users) built my own bespoke HN suite that notifies me on replies, stories that I might be interested in, etc. It just sits quietly on a VPS and sends messages to me over Signal. Never open-sourced it because the code is a dire abomination. Yours is probably the first Chrome side-panel variation that I've seen though.
rtaylorgarlock 6mo ago
Can we get one which scans for downvotes on comments which are either positive or in anyway against any dominant narrative in HN? *If you feel attacked by this comment, you know exactly what to do. Do it. Fulfill your destiny.
- dataviz1000 6mo ago
  What do you mean by this? I was thinking allowing people to follow users so they get a stream of posts and comments from users they are interested in the side bar
  - rtaylorgarlock 6mo ago
    My comments have a weird history: either I display technical prowess and flavor my comment negatively (as is statistically more common on HN), or I get downvoted. My response is to spend less time on HN :D if I want pressure to think a certain way by people with limited skin-in-the-game in my life, i'll just show up to a fundamentalist church ;)
xnx 6mo ago
Also https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnreplies.com https://hnreplies.com
- skmurphy 6mo ago
  I find HN Replies very useful. https://hnreplies.com https://hnreplies.com
latchkey 6mo ago
I'll add this to Orange Juice soon too. You should just submit a PR to OJ. https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/issues/3 https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/issues/3
- dataviz1000 6mo ago
  Awesome! If one other person uses it, it is good enough for me. If you use it and want more features, post in the issue queue or respond to one of my comments -- I'll get it. The engine that makes the requests and does the logic is agnostic and probably is portable copy and paste into your project. The one thing I have are all the tests and red team adversary agents that do very well to surface bugs.
JCattheATM 6mo ago
The type of people that always need to have the last word in discussions abuse tools like this, but thankfully there are not too many of them on HN.
cadamsdotcom 6mo ago
I use the RSS feed of replies to my username.
caminanteblanco 6mo ago
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the thread link in the header shows all your recent comment threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=caminanteblanco https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=caminanteblanco That's plenty enough to capture the 80/20 of my use case
- dataviz1000 6mo ago
  I don't understand what you mean. Should I update the instructions so something is more clear? Also what is the other 20%?
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 6mo ago
    > Should I update the instructions so something is more clear? I believe they are referring to the "threads" link in the header of HN pages for an authenticated request. Can't say what the 20% is, of course. As for the 80%, it's a pull instead of a push but that page shows logged-in users their recent comments and the reply threads for them.
  - caminanteblanco 6mo ago
    Sorry for any ambiguity, I meant the HackerNews header link, and for me the 20 is that I'm not sure if that link shows replies to submissions I make. Your project looks awesome, and like a great solution for people looking for push notifications.
    - dataviz1000 6mo ago
      Yes, the badge on the icon was counting the replies to my comments and posts as it was important them. What is the other 20%?
      - caminanteblanco 6mo ago
        I don't mean the 80/20 of your project, I mean of my use case. It looks like HNswered would be able to handle pretty close to all 100% of my use case. But the nature of the 80/20 analogy is that oftentimes the 80 is good enough for most
what 6mo ago
I just want to say please no. Comment chains where two people are arguing are the worst. Negative value. I’m always confused how they happen here, are people just refreshing their comments page waiting for a reply?
- dataviz1000 6mo ago
  > Negative value. You understand the irony here? Is the issue that other people are in flame wars or that you open with negative sentiment comments and people respond in kind? I appreciate your comment because it is an opportunity for me to test the extension works correctly surfacing your comment with little notification. Thank you. :)
- threepts 6mo ago
  Internet validation is worth gold to the mentally destitute.
tpsvca 6mo ago
[dead]
donatj 6mo ago
I wish hacker news both - had notifications of comments on threads - let you comment on very old posts I recently discovered someone on HN in 2014 commenting on something I wrote in 2006 and I'd love to be able to reply AND have it seen!
- dataviz1000 6mo ago
  You can configure this to start tracking replies that are 90 days or less if you set the 'catch up on replies from past'.

30 points by dataviz1000 6mo ago

dvt 6mo ago

At least write the README yourself, it's like 4 sentences.

scratchyone 6mo ago
also > A self-contained security audit prompt is available at docs/security-audit.md. lmfao
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
dataviz1000 6mo ago
I spent at least 10 hours testing it yesterday. I got a lot of relief when the number badge incremented telling me that some commented on this post. Thank you. To me the most interesting thing is the different red team adversary agents I'm using. There is a Jony Ive design critic agent which is surprisingly very good, a red team agent that does normal code review and bug hunting by injecting logging into the code running it in isolation in the /tmp/ folder, a red team agent that code reviews and find bugs in the test harnesses, and an agent that does mutation testing by breaking the code creating regressions to make sure that the test harness catch them -- I wanted to call it the trickster agent but did didn't want to drift from training and density in the LLM model. I did a huge amount of experimentation last week discovering that if a model misses a bug or gets something wrong, running an adversary agent using the same model or family of models will not surface it. Everyone has the intuition about that but I can describe why using data. So Claude writes code that is orders of magnitude better than any project I inherited in the past 15 years and I'd have ChatGPT run all the adversaries. In order to surface replies to posts and comments it requires huge amounts requests so I needed to figure out what the optimal request rate is based on frequency of replies over time. First posts get replies after a week so there isn't any reason to surface them. After analysis, I can conclude a request every 5 minutes in the background is enough. What is that 288 (pollComments) + 144 (author-sync) = 432 requests/day per user? I spent a couple hours on that. Actually, I started with the Hacker News API and then realized that I should check the https://hn.algolia.com/api https://hn.algolia.com/api but wanted to know which is optimal including using both. After experimentation and research I discovered that ~432 requests a day at Algolia is enough.

mindcrime 6mo ago

Does anybody have a master list of all of the projects that implemented this (or something very similar) over the years? It's got to be a pretty long list by now. The weird part is, there seems to be enough demand for this that these keep popping up, but not so much that any of them ever hang around.

dataviz1000 6mo ago
Before starting I tried searching but I couldn't find anything. Frequently I come across comments about people wanting this feature. Here is the proof. [0] > yes please! i need a "comment to follow" functionality on HN So I built it. I built this for one user named swyx. I'm going to email him now letting him know I built it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402785
- mindcrime 6mo ago
  There have definitely been a few over the years, especially if you include scenarios beyond just "get notified for replies". Some have been webapps, some have been browser plugins, etc. Here's some discussion of one recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21172406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21172406 And some more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42814917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42814917 And HNChat, which went a little further: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12431724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12431724 That said, don't take this as criticism. It's clearly something that some HN users want. If you can make it stick, more power to you!
- vunderba 6mo ago
  There have been quite a few of them over the years in varying degrees of complexity. I think the most well-known one is probably HN Replies. A simple Github search returns the following results. HN Notifier https://github.com/meanands/hn-notifier https://github.com/meanands/hn-notifier Hacker New Telegram Bot https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot HN Reply Notifier https://github.com/lotsofnoise/hn-reply-notifier https://github.com/lotsofnoise/hn-reply-notifier And there have been Show HNs on them as well. Show HN: I built an open-source notification inbox widget for Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36373123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36373123 Show HN: HN Reader – Track your conversations across Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240221 I (and probably a lot of other HN users) built my own bespoke HN suite that notifies me on replies, stories that I might be interested in, etc. It just sits quietly on a VPS and sends messages to me over Signal. Never open-sourced it because the code is a dire abomination. Yours is probably the first Chrome side-panel variation that I've seen though.

rtaylorgarlock 6mo ago

Can we get one which scans for downvotes on comments which are either positive or in anyway against any dominant narrative in HN? *If you feel attacked by this comment, you know exactly what to do. Do it. Fulfill your destiny.

dataviz1000 6mo ago
What do you mean by this? I was thinking allowing people to follow users so they get a stream of posts and comments from users they are interested in the side bar
- rtaylorgarlock 6mo ago
  My comments have a weird history: either I display technical prowess and flavor my comment negatively (as is statistically more common on HN), or I get downvoted. My response is to spend less time on HN :D if I want pressure to think a certain way by people with limited skin-in-the-game in my life, i'll just show up to a fundamentalist church ;)

xnx 6mo ago

Also https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnreplies.com https://hnreplies.com

skmurphy 6mo ago
I find HN Replies very useful. https://hnreplies.com https://hnreplies.com

latchkey 6mo ago

I'll add this to Orange Juice soon too. You should just submit a PR to OJ. https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/issues/3 https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/issues/3

dataviz1000 6mo ago
Awesome! If one other person uses it, it is good enough for me. If you use it and want more features, post in the issue queue or respond to one of my comments -- I'll get it. The engine that makes the requests and does the logic is agnostic and probably is portable copy and paste into your project. The one thing I have are all the tests and red team adversary agents that do very well to surface bugs.

JCattheATM 6mo ago

The type of people that always need to have the last word in discussions abuse tools like this, but thankfully there are not too many of them on HN.

cadamsdotcom 6mo ago

I use the RSS feed of replies to my username.

caminanteblanco 6mo ago

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the thread link in the header shows all your recent comment threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=caminanteblanco https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=caminanteblanco That's plenty enough to capture the 80/20 of my use case

dataviz1000 6mo ago
I don't understand what you mean. Should I update the instructions so something is more clear? Also what is the other 20%?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 6mo ago
  > Should I update the instructions so something is more clear? I believe they are referring to the "threads" link in the header of HN pages for an authenticated request. Can't say what the 20% is, of course. As for the 80%, it's a pull instead of a push but that page shows logged-in users their recent comments and the reply threads for them.
- caminanteblanco 6mo ago
  Sorry for any ambiguity, I meant the HackerNews header link, and for me the 20 is that I'm not sure if that link shows replies to submissions I make. Your project looks awesome, and like a great solution for people looking for push notifications.
  - dataviz1000 6mo ago
    Yes, the badge on the icon was counting the replies to my comments and posts as it was important them. What is the other 20%?
    - caminanteblanco 6mo ago
      I don't mean the 80/20 of your project, I mean of my use case. It looks like HNswered would be able to handle pretty close to all 100% of my use case. But the nature of the 80/20 analogy is that oftentimes the 80 is good enough for most

what 6mo ago

I just want to say please no. Comment chains where two people are arguing are the worst. Negative value. I’m always confused how they happen here, are people just refreshing their comments page waiting for a reply?

dataviz1000 6mo ago
> Negative value. You understand the irony here? Is the issue that other people are in flame wars or that you open with negative sentiment comments and people respond in kind? I appreciate your comment because it is an opportunity for me to test the extension works correctly surfacing your comment with little notification. Thank you. :)
threepts 6mo ago
Internet validation is worth gold to the mentally destitute.

tpsvca 6mo ago

[dead]

donatj 6mo ago

I wish hacker news both - had notifications of comments on threads - let you comment on very old posts I recently discovered someone on HN in 2014 commenting on something I wrote in 2006 and I'd love to be able to reply AND have it seen!

dataviz1000 6mo ago
You can configure this to start tracking replies that are 90 days or less if you set the 'catch up on replies from past'.