IDEA:
Hacker News is a great resource for news and interesting discussions. However, sometimes I wish it could do a little better in some areas like reading on mobile, sending notifications about replies, and perhaps having more social features.<p>We decided to take a different look at HN and build a feed with notifications for HN users, which will notify about the following items:<p>- When a user you follow comments on Hacker News (e.g. ptacek, patio11, dang)<p>- When someone responds to your comments (I've missed a response from kevin once :(. This could've helped)<p>- When someone posts a topic/keyword, which you follow and it gains popularity (e.g. "lisp", "scheme")<p>TEAM and COMMITMENT:
We are 4 guys residing in Uzbekistan -- all working on the same startup. We'd like to think we are smart -- 3/4 of us got full rides to study at UMBC/UPenn/Hertfordshire. We are committed to succeed -- as a team, but not necessarily with this or some other idea. In the past we worked at Morgan Stanley, Western Union, and created apps for others.<p>WHY HN APPLY:
This as an experiment. So far we have an idea and an Android prototype. We invested 4 days of work. If we are picked, we will pursue this full time over the summer and ship weekly builds.<p>We need your feedback on this. I am sure some people won't need it because it will ruin the simplicity of HN but, perhaps, as power users you need some other features and use-cases. Let us know.<p>PS: As Hacker News API is very limited, we have to do lots of work to build our own API from ground up to add rich set of API. Sorry if things break -- we only spent a couple of days on this.
Since you're probably using a backend for checking if somebody replied to your comment (and don't do it in your app because that would be slow and battle draining) do you consider adding email notifications? I'm not really interested in a new hacker news app – the one I'm currently using is just fine.<p>Email notifications could be invaluable, though.
I made a Chrome plugin to do this... <a href="http://imgur.com/xQ9bzyi" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/xQ9bzyi</a> It let's you 'follow' people, tag them with keywords, easily look up profiles. It parses out interesting things (keybase, twitter, email, etc) too. The fun bit is the tagging - it syncs tags using firebase so it's delightfully collaborative. Or it would be if it had more than one user. Like many, many side projects, it's unfinished and on hold while I work on other things. I plan on finishing it, but if someone (you guys...) makes something that works then that'd be awesome.
This is a huge pain point when initially developing web applications—spinning up redis instance, pub/sub, dirtying up models/controllers. I mean even facebook struuugggled with their +1 notification bug for years.<p>If you can somehow normalize and create systematic best practices for notifications, this could be a very large SaaS product.
This would be very useful. It'd be great if accessible via desktop not just mobile. It would be cool if it ultimately ended up being incorporated into the main HN site. Not sure why the opprobrium against it - it's a fully optional addition to one's use of HN.
BTW, does anyone know what happened to hn notify via email? It seems it has stop to work for me, but I really need something around replies to my comments.
While this is a very cool idea, how to you intend to make money? I would assume YC would object/revoke API access if you tried to monetize their content.<p>From the YFC eligibility FAQ:<p><i>Can non-profits apply?
Sorry, we’re not accepting non-profits for this experiment. If the experiment goes well though, we hope to fund some in the future.</i><p>Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Never seen the .uz CCTLD. Turns out it's from Uzbekistan. Does anyone know where a foreigner could buy one? Or how difficult is it to purchase? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uz" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uz</a>
not sure whether this is a good idea…<p>limiting your news aggregation by following a few (preferred) people makes me wonder whether you'd not better share your email address and start a cozy conversation.<p>i'm aware this app is for those interested and those who don't can continue to use hackernews as they're used to, but i fail to see the added value of making it "social"…