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…
HN Follow – email alerts from your friends on Hacker News launched on November 9, 2022 with 25 votes, #1,131 of 3,471 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.
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…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- HFHN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN2023 · val.town · ▲133
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 on Val Town. We’re trying to create a new web primitive that you can: 1. write like a function 2. run like a script 3. fork like a repo 4. install like an app This is our 5th iteration of this same “HN Follow” app. We launched the 3rd version here on Hacker News six months ago[1], but it was very kindly removed from the front page by dang in favor of us launching Val Town itself first, which we did in…
- HFHN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN2014 · hn-follow.desh.es · ▲76
- MHMeet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city2024 · ▲768
Hey HN! I just published https://meet.hn, a map to find hackers in your city. How it works? Demo of the signup process: https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329 1. Fill the form: username, city+country 2. Copy the text generated in the box below the form, and paste it in your HN description. 3. Click "Add me on the map" Optionnaly (it's recommended!) you can add links to your socials as well as some tags to showcase your interests. Why does it exist? I created this because, despite its harsh reputation on the internet, I love the HN community. I…
My recommendation engine for Hacker News2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · ▲314Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…
- FHFind Hidden Gems on HN2025 · pj4533.com · ▲118
Hey HN. I created this website. https://pj4533.com/hn-overlooked/ It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this. I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I…
- HRHN Replies – Get notified of replies to your comments2016 · hnreplies.com · ▲217
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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, November 2022
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