[mindcrime]

Do you continually refresh the "Threads" page throughout the day?

Yes.

I hope not; it seems woefully inefficient.

It's that way by design, as I understand it. Pg wasn't trying to create a traditional discussion forum when he built HN and from what I can recall reading/hearing, he intentionally did not implement reply notifications and suchlike.

That said, there have been various 3rd party "HN notifier" services over the years, like hnnotify.com (or something like that) and hnreply.com (or similar). Not sure if any of those are still up and running or not though.