Is there a way to subscribe to a convo via email or RSS, or do you just constantly have to come back to check for replies?<p>If (as it seems) there's not a way to subscribe to push notifications once you've joined a conversation, does anyone know if this is deliberate, or just something that hasn't yet been implemented. If it's the latter, I vote for setting this up ASAP. I'd love to be able to subscribe to Hacker News convos via email.
Write a little script that pulls <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<username>" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<username></a>; and does some magic to pull out the info into an RSS feed <i>(yes, ideally pg can add this as a real feature, but I'm being pragmatic here ;-)).</i><p>Just a messy Ruby-based example I threw together. Works for me.<p><pre><code> require 'rubygems'
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'
username = 'petercooper'
uri = 'http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=' + username
doc = Hpricot(open(uri))
puts %{<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Hacker News responses to #{username}</title>
<link>#{uri}</link>}
(doc/'td td table').each do |post|
content = post.inner_html
next if content =~ />#{username}</ # skip if we posted it
next unless post.inner_html =~ /vote/ # skip if it's not a post
id = content[/\_(\d+)/,1]
comment_text = (post/'.comment').first.inner_text
commenter = content[/user\?id=(\w+)/,1]
puts %{ <item>\n <title>Comment from #{commenter}</title>}
puts %{ <link>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=#{id}</link>}
puts %{ <description>#{comment_text}</description>\n </item>}
end
puts %{</channel></rss>}
</code></pre>
It'd be better, but the HTML on Hacker News is from 1996. I was too sloppy to bother fetching the title of the current thread ;-)<p>With just adding a shebang line and a content-type header line, it works no problems on Dreamhost as a CGI script. Example: <a href="http://bigbold.dreamhosters.com/hnc.cgi" rel="nofollow">http://bigbold.dreamhosters.com/hnc.cgi</a><p>Anyway, thanks for giving me the idea. I'm using that now myself.. lol.
I wrote a silly little Rails app one weekend to help me with problems like this.<p><a href="http://SeeURLater.com" rel="nofollow">http://SeeURLater.com</a><p>You add a bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks toolbar, then whenever you're on a page that you want to remember to revisit later, you use the bookmarklet which fires up a little popup window, delicious style, that lets you save the URL. Each night you get one email message with all the links you added the previous day, reminding you to revisit them. No links added? No email the next day.<p>It's stupid simple, and very minimalist right now, but it's been working for me, and you're all welcome to use it. =-)
<i>Is there a way to subscribe to a convo via email or RSS, or do you just constantly have to come back to check for replies?</i><p>There's not really a good way. You just check back every so often, and even then, there's not a good way to view the comments that have been newly added. This has been discussed here before, but HN deliberately tries to keep things simple, so I wouldn't bet on this feature being added anytime soon.
I mostly use the "threads" view, and sometimes click on the story title to see whether someone has added a new interesting comment there.<p>It's a shame there's no way to visually identify new comments, though. When I post up an article and I'm interested in <i>all</i> the comments, after it goes past 50 or so it becomes very hard to track new comments.