A perl script which outputs the usernames for new comments on Hacker News, preceded by the date.

newcomments.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $url = "https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments";

sub html {
  `curl get $url 2>/dev/null`;
}

printf "# %s", `date`;

my @usernames;
for my $line (html()) {
  my @usernames = ($line =~ m/href="user\?id=([^"]*)"/g);
  # print $line;
  for $username (@usernames) {
    printf "%s\n", $username;
  }
}