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:
- When a user you follow comments on Hacker News (e.g. ptacek, patio11, dang)
- When someone responds to your comments (I've missed a response from kevin once :(. This could've helped)
- When someone posts a topic/keyword, which you follow and it gains popularity (e.g. "lisp", "scheme")
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't get us wrong, we don't want to change that. What we do want is to give some people the ability to make their experience richer. This is not for everyone but it can be helpful for some people.
Personal anecdote -- I asked a question one time but no one answered it. I deleted my question but as I was doing that Kevin Hale (a YC partner) responded back. After he posted it looked like he was talking to no-one. Fortunately, dang emailed me to notify that there was a response and asked if he could bring back my post. If I had gotten a notification about a response, this peculiar situation could have been avoided.
That is not to say that things like notifications might not be useful, just that I come here more for the content and intelligent thought, and less for the social aspect.
>> - When a user you follow comments on Hacker News (e.g. ptacek, patio11, dang)
Reddit has something like this but they didn't invest in it at all, and even with that it's a terrific source of content for if you as a user invest the effort in collecting friends.
If you could take this feature on reddit to the max(for example advanced filtering) and package it as sort of mini-magazines, it would enable users to build terrific resources/magazines/feeds on many varied subjects, by experts, with great content quality, far above the bullshit of ad-driven media.
And why reddit and not HN: the best reason is the variety of experts, not availble in HN. Also you could filter by subreddit and other stuff, there's an API, there's already a notification built into reddit(which increases virality).
I suppose no-one is thinking about about the majority of readers (lurkers who come to read more interesting exchanges than could be found on reddit) who are caught in the middle that end up with a worse experience as a result. I trust that HN moderators will make the right decision, which is to prevent this type of access from overwhelming the nature of HN.
Thanks for you feedback!
I think it depends on the person whether he/she wants to be nice or not. Personally, I take a deep breath and wait for a few hours to reply if I think I am mad or I am offended.
Notifications are there for you not to miss something. Once you have that ability, it's up to you how to you use it. I agree that this might create some burden on moderators. We will have to try and see.
Email notifications could be invaluable, though.
Also, we are considering adding a Telegram bot for notifications. Please let us know if someone would like this.
EDIT: I can't reply to posts below, so I am going to post here. The android notifications are default. On top of that we would like to offer other types of notifications: SMS, Email, Telegram bots, etc.
From the YFC eligibility FAQ:
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.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
One of the uses of our notification system is to notify users about certain keywords in the articles. Let's say you study for GRE and you need to memorize 1000 words. Currently, you can study with flash cards but ideally you need to read New York Times, Washington Post, Nautilus, Economist to really see the words in sentences.
What if we could notify you when certain keywords appear in these articles? I bet you would love to keep track of these words and with notifications you will only read newest articles. I hope some people would pay for such usage.
If you can somehow normalize and create systematic best practices for notifications, this could be a very large SaaS product.
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.
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"…
