Hi everyone. There used to be a site that did this, but it disappeared a few months ago, so I made HN Replies last night to fill the void.

I check HN's API for new comments every 10 minutes, and send an e-mail notification when a new reply to one of your comments shows up. This is what the notification mail will look like:

http://i.imgur.com/f8jaAm8.png

Wouldn't this just have the same problem as the previous site? The functionality for this tool seems better implemented as a Chromium or Firefox plugin rather than a service.

What were the problems with the previous site? I used it without major problems.

Wouldn't a browser plugin require you to actively be using HN, or at least have a tab open? Getting an email notification four hours later that someone replied to you on HN, so you may want to take a look is nice (if you don't want to be a slave to HN, don't check your email as often or don't deal immediately with this email).

Additionally, in a browser extension, there's then a lot of people grabbing the comment history rather than a single program, which necessarily puts a higher load on HN.

Major problem with it going offline, hence this new tool, which may or may not go offline at some point again. I am sure you could build an extension that polls the HN API every couple of seconds or so to check for replies and have it show a popup when you get a notification as well as send an email.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API