This reminded me of this http://hnalerts.com/. I think it still works. Mind you it's been a long time since I've submitted anything that made it to the front page. ;)

Also see http://hnnotify.com/, which shoots you an email when someone replies to one of your comments. It's been chugging a long for a number of years now and definitely still works.

Heh, I use https://www.hnwatcher.com/

If you'd rather not have to code to make this happen: https://zapier.com/zapbook/zaps/675/post-message-slack-when-...

(works for comment mentions, too)

Similarly, has anyone used http://notify.ly/

I can't tell if you can create custom hooks (similar to zapier's zaps) without signing up.

Thanks for mentioning notify.ly, Simply, u can use notify with slack to get notifed if your name, domain, or any other topics get mentioned in key sites like HN posts and replies that how I found this reply ;)

Also we recently introduced source settings by which you can tailor your notifications for example follow a certain product on PH and so on.

We do support Twitter, tumbler, HN, PH, reddit and much more.

It's 100% free

cheers ^^

Behind the scenes it's just using the Algolia API: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=zapier

You can also get notified over mail not just for your links but also for something of your interest -- here is the ifttt recipe

https://ifttt.com/recipes/280297-hackernews-to-mail

This is based on the main page RSS, so you wouldn't get notified by an IFTTT recipe unless you got on the main page. Also IFTTT doesn't seem to support SMS outside US, so not sure how this could be done there.

Pretty amazing that it's 2015 and we're still building custom code to make links go both ways.

EDIT: Just realized that HN is going to be sensitive to this comment due to the "middlebrow criticism" issue. I have absolutely no problem with Twilio's blog post or this project. Hacky fixes have their place -- just know what you're doing and don't abandon hope of getting good infrastructure some day.

I agree. In 2000 or so when I first started blogging, pingbacks [1] (or its variation, trackbacks) seemed like it would take off as a popular mechanism for link notification. Unfortunately, for various reasons, it doesn't seem to have really taken off.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback

If you like this sort of thing, it is worth looking a Yahoo Pipes.

E.g. I created a pipe today to give me an RSS feed of HN submissions about Haskell.

I built http://hnapp.com specifically to generate custom RSS & JSON feeds for HN. It's opensource on github too.

For example: http://hnapp.com/?q=haskell%20type%3Astory%20score%3E20

Thanks that is what I was really looking for. I will now use it.

They mean "posts an article about your domain". It's a feed watcher, not a firewall.

I am really not too familiar with Google Alerts, but doesn't Google Alerts encompass this?

Google alerts is pretty far from real-time and their coverage is spotty at best.

I don't think it allows you to filter the source of the comment. Personally I can't fathom what role Twilio is serving in this mix. Just use the API.

Even if Twilio were simply providing a proxy for accessing the Google Alerts API, I would use Twilio's proxy over Google's.

Twilio consistently provides excellent documentation and developer support, whereas Google's results on that front are very mixed (varies widely by product).

That's a bit of a stretch. You wouldn't get better results than using Google's APIs, if anything you introduced another failure point and authentication credentials that you need to track and update regularly.

You don't need to use Google at all. This would be a 20-minute project using the HN API.

Twilio is a whole extra level of cruft. Any machine can send an email, so unless you want a voice call to tell you someone mentioned you on HN it makes absolutely no sense.

The new HN API? Which one do you mean? Please post the link.