Hey gingerlime, unfortunately hn doesn't offer notifications itself, so that would be difficult to implement, and outside the scope of Chime. I'm definitely feeling your pain right now, though =P
Clear all will just hide all notifications from Chime. Marking them as read is too undo-able, we wouldn't want users to accidentally mark a ton of important emails as read.
Right now we send a notification as soon as it happens. We're looking at implementing a pause mode, so you wouldn't get interrupted by notifications when you need to focus.
Pooling notifications is interesting, we'll definitely be looking at that in the future!
Great to hear that you like Chime! The frequency is different for every service, and is also based on a few other metrics. It'll pick up notifications within a few minutes, usually.
We have a lot of blog posts, and I don't think they're meant to represent the views of the company.