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.

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

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

Kibo greps

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.

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

You can try our tool for example: https://KWatch.io

It monitors keywords mentioned on X, Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube, Quora, Reddit, and YC.

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.

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

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

hi! :-) As I commented elsewhere, f5bot.com is a nice, free tool to monitor HN