ggerganov / hnreplies Public

Currently the Hacker News forum lacks the functionality to notify its users when another user has responded to their comment. 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. In any case, this is a simple attempt to offer such functionality in the form of a 3rd party service.

The HNReplies service tracks all comments posted on HN in realtime by querying the official HN API. The comments are then grouped by their parent's username by storing them as files in respective directories on the disk. The collected data can then be used to efficiently query for the latest replies to a certain user.

Although I implemented this mostly for educational purposes, maybe it can potentially find some useful applications. For example, you can write a script that sends an e-mail notification every time someone responds to you on HN. All it takes is to query the HNReplies service with your username every ~5 minutes and check for new replies.

Each leaf is a text file with the JSON result of querying the HN API about the corresponding item Id. For example, the file ./data/mayoff/2921983 contains the JSON obtained from the HN API query:

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