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

https://github.com/adam-s/HNswered

by dataviz1000 • 3 months ago

30 33 3 months ago

github.com

dvt• 3 months ago

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

scratchyone• 3 months ago

also

A self-contained security audit prompt is available at docs/security-audit.md.

lmfao

dataviz10008• 3 months 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 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.

mindcrime2• 3 months 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.

dataviz10008• 3 months 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

mindcrime2• 3 months 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

And some more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42814917

And HNChat, which went a little further:

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• 3 months 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

Hacker New Telegram Bot

https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot

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

Show HN: HN Reader – Track your conversations across Hacker News

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.

xrd• 3 months ago

Funny, I built something similar and I think I told swyx about it as well!

https://plzat.me/

Swyx is certainly a taste maker!

Mine is just to track conversations. You can follow a thread and get notified when it is updated. It used to work on Firefox Mobile but some how an automatic android update disabled my extension and I have not spent the time to fix it.

adamzwasserman• 3 months ago

I know I did done:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240221

I built a Chrome extension to solve a problem I kept having: losing track of conversations on HN. The threads page is a firehose. Someone replies to your comment, you miss it, the conversation dies. Or you revisit a thread and can't remember which comments you've already read.

HN Reader does three things:

1. Hides stories you've seen – Checkbox next to each story. Check it to dim. Helps filter the front page to stuff you haven't looked at yet. 2. Collapsible comments that remember – Click the arrow to collapse a comment thread. Come back later and it stays collapsed, unless someone added a new reply, then it auto-expands with a "NEW" badge. 3. Highlights your conversations – On your threads page, badges show "you", "replied to you", and "you replied" so you can instantly spot active conversations.

That last one is what made me build this. I was missing replies buried in long threads. Now I just glance at my threads page and the blue "replied to you" badges jump out.

Everything stays in local storage. No server, no account, no tracking. Auto-cleans old data when storage gets full.

GitHub: https://github.com/adamzwasserman/hnreader

Works in Chrome, Arc, and any Chromium browser. Load it unpacked from the repo.

Feedback welcome – especially on what other HN reading problems you'd want solved.

rtaylorgarlock2• 3 months 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.

dataviz10008• 3 months 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

rtaylorgarlock2• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

Also

https://hnrss.github.io/

https://hnreplies.com

skmurphy• 3 months ago

I find HN Replies very useful. https://hnreplies.com

latchkey• 3 months 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

dataviz10008• 3 months 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• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

I use the RSS feed of replies to my username.

caminanteblanco3• 3 months 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

That's plenty enough to capture the 80/20 of my use case

dataviz10008• 3 months 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• 3 months 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.

caminanteblanco3• 3 months 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.

mandeepj• 3 months ago

The “Threads” link came much later; “Comments” link on your profile is there from a long time ago, or maybe since beginning. Now it’s a redirect to “Threads”.

sillysaurusx• 3 months ago

And not to be confused with the “comments” link in the header that takes you to a page of newest comments site-wide: https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments

I’m amazed it still works. Imagine having a page showing every single new Reddit comment site-wide.

dfxm12• 3 months ago

Me too. I wonder what the other other 20% consists of. I think a huge part of it would aid continuing arguments that long outlive the productive discussion around the article.

what• 3 months 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?

dataviz10008• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

Internet validation is worth gold to the mentally destitute.

donatj• 3 months 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!

dataviz10008• 3 months 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'.

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

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