Hey John, I'm just curious how people find these comments about "would be nice if X saw this" on HN. I don't think there's any pinging behavior. Did somebody message you? Did you just happen to read it? Do you have an eldritch curse that summons you when called by name?

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hellojohnbuck a day ago | parent | next [-]

Somebody subscribed to my blog with ref to hacker news so i just poked my head in :-)

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kens 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use f5bot.com, which monitors HN, Reddit, and Lobsters. (I have no connection to f5bot except being a happy user.)

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shawn_w a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Once upon a time there was a guy who went by Kibo who would search Usenet feeds for posts mentioning his username and reply to them...

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Cthulhu_ a day ago | parent | next [-]

I bet Musk hacked something together (or has a column in TweetDeck if that's still around) that continuously searches for mentions. I wonder if there's a tool like that that covers more of the internet, although the primary users would only be famous people and/or their agents / social media staff.

	▲	wongarsu a day ago \| parent [-]
		There are lots of tools that do this if you are willing to pay for it. "Social Media Monitoring" or "Brand Monitoring" would be the keywords to search for

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wiredfool a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Kibo greps

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phibz 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've seen Ken Shirriff do this. You mention him and suddenly he's there.

	▲	kens 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		hi! :-) As I commented elsewhere, f5bot.com is a nice, free tool to monitor HN

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davedx a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From what I've seen, sometimes people see that their blog post got a lot of referral traffic from Hacker News and they come have a look to see where it came from.

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throwaway314155 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Not who you're asking for, but generally I think it's just a case of the author also being an HN regular. Although, I suppose you could set up some Google Alerts for mentions of your blog posts.