HN Follow – email alerts from your friends on Hacker News
HN Follow lets you “follow” authors on Hacker News, and get email notifications when they post. It was inspired by alerthn.com and hnreplies.com. The app was built in an experimental style. Instead of being a normal app where we store all your data, it is just a wrapper over a series of JavaScript snippets that we guide you through installing, and which you can then customize 100%. The scripts call out to Agolia’s wonderful HN Search API. You can read more about the app’s architecture and it’s motivation here[1]. HN Follow runs on Val Town [2], an online scripting tool my team and I are…
In plain words
HN Follow enables users to follow specific authors on Hacker News and receive email notifications when those authors post new stories or comments. Built as a collection of customizable JavaScript snippets rather than a traditional application, it uses the Hacker News Search API to monitor author activity. The tool runs on Val Town, a scripting platform, and allows users to maintain full control over their data and customize the scripts entirely to their needs.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
HN Follow lets you “follow” authors on Hacker News, and get email notifications when they post. It was inspired by alerthn.com and hnreplies.com. The app was built in an experimental style. Instead of being a normal app where we store all your data, it is just a wrapper over a series of JavaScript snippets that we guide you through installing, and which you can then customize 100%. The scripts call out to Agolia’s wonderful HN Search API. You can read more about the app’s architecture and it’s motivation here[1]. HN Follow runs on Val Town [2], an online scripting tool my team and I are building. Part of why we built hnfollow.com is to show off the kind of things you can do with the primitives Val Town provides:emailing yourself (`console.email`), persistent state (`@me.foo = "bar"`), persistent cron jobs (`setInterval`), etc. Here’s a demo[3], the docs[4], and Discord[5] for Val Town. We hope hnfollow.com is useful to you, and you have fun customizing the code directly on Val Town! Let us know if you have questions or feedback [1] - https://www.notion.so/End-programmer-Programming-a749beb4a9b... [2] - https://val.town [3] - https://www.loom.com/share/878294970d8e48919c819f35d0cd0da4 [4] - https://www.notion.so/Val-Town-Docs-01c8eb9c534b4899802f3a9e... [5] - https://discord.gg/dHv45uN5RY
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Launched alongside, November 2022
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I made a thing! In 2014, I was holding a stack of iPhones and thought to myself: "Hey, if I had each phone display a playing card, I could click a button and they'd shuffle themselves" I pared that idea all the way down to this: trading cards made of e-ink displays. Right now, each card costs me about $20 each, but with only a bit more scale, I think I can get that down to $10. In doing this project, I learned how to design electronics and circuit boards. I learned Rust and wrote my first driver, I upped my CAD skills, 3D printed, and did my first resin casting. I generated the images on the…
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