I open-sourced my HN comment/reply alerts service

In plain words

A notification service that sends email alerts when someone replies to or comments on a user's Hacker News posts. The tool is designed for Hacker News users who want to stay informed about engagement on their submissions. The creator has open-sourced both the frontend and backend code after limited user adoption, making it available for developers who want to self-host or modify the solution.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Django backend services for Hacker News email alerts application. - mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-backend

In the maker’s words, at launch

2 months ago I launched a service that sends email alerts when you get a new comment/reply on Hacker News. I've only been able to acquire 6 users since releasing it (°ー°〃) I tried promoting it here (duuh), Reddit, and LinkedIn. Optimized it for SEO (ranking 3rd on my target keywords). All with limited success.…

• HR
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  Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…

• HN
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• FH
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  Hi HN! I’ve been lurking for a while, but out of fear of being steamrolled by HN readers or maybe just natural introversion, I’ve always been too scared to post or comment. Which is why 1. this is my first real Hacker News submission 2. my friend Michael and I built "Fake" Hacker News, a place to post and see what AI-generated HN comments might say. Here’s a video of me using fakeHN to test this very submission: https://www.loom.com/share/4b9f4f9d7c77489a86baeb92ec55a1ed?... And an example of one of our generated posts:…

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