&gt; Major problem with it going offline, hence this new tool, which may or may not go offline at some point again.<p>I&#x27;m not sure I understand this sentiment.  It&#x27;s a tool that provides a capability that wasn&#x27;t there before, so event if it goes away later, you still get the utility it provided while it worked.  Since the cost is just providing and email address, that seems a worthwhile trade to me.  If it was a trade between this and some other implementation that worked, and it&#x27;s possible closure at a later date would force you to set up with another service afterwards <i>and you wouldn&#x27;t if you chose the correct service in the first place</i>, then that&#x27;s a different story.<p>&gt; I am sure you could build an extension that polls the HN API every couple of seconds or so to check for replies and have it show a popup when you get a notification as well as send an email.<p>Well, I&#x27;m not sure it would be nice to HN to query them an extra time every few seconds X the number or people that might install the extension.  If it&#x27;s a query every 10 seconds, and 1000 people run it, you&#x27;ve just increased their load by 100 queries a second.