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.