Show HN: HNswered – watches for replies to your Hacker News posts and comments

Source: Hacker News

HNswered

HNswered is a small Chrome side‑panel for Hacker News replies.

Set your HN username once. HNswered watches the public stories and comments you have authored, surfaces direct replies in a local inbox, and keeps an unread badge in the toolbar.

• No HN login.
• No server.
• No write access.
• Just public HN data, matched locally.

What It Does

• Finds replies to your HN stories and comments, even when the original comment is deep in a thread.
• Shows a clean side‑panel inbox with unread/read filters.
• Lets you refresh on demand after posting something new.
• Catches up after Chrome has been asleep or closed.
• Keeps state local in Chrome storage.

How It Works

One simple idea: every reply on HN points at its parent. HNswered remembers what you wrote and watches public comments for replies to those.

flowchart LR
    A["your HN username"] --> B["items you wrote"]
    C["public HN comments"] --> D{"reply to
one of yours?"}
    B -.-> D
    D -- yes --> E["your inbox"]
    D -- no --> F["ignore"]

That’s it. No login, no server, no backend you have to trust.

Install

The repository ships a pre‑built dist/. No Node or build step is required.

# 1. Open chrome://extensions and enable Developer mode.
# 2. Click "Load unpacked" in the new toolbar.
# 3. Choose the repository's dist folder (produced by pnpm build).
# 4. Open the extensions menu and pin HNswered to the toolbar.
# 5. Enter your Hacker News username — watching starts immediately.

Security

A self‑contained security audit prompt is available at docs/security-audit.md.

For Contributors

Build from source (only needed if you change code — the repo ships a pre‑built dist/):

pnpm install
pnpm build
pnpm test && pnpm type-check && pnpm harness:replay

Architecture notes, matching‑strategy validation, and the local research harnesses live in cost-analysis/docs/.