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Life & fun · May 25, 2023

HF

HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN

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…

HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN launched on May 25, 2023 with 133 votes, #315 of 4,910 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was not reachable when checked in September 2026.

Visit val.town ↗Alternativestop 6% of May 2023

In plain words

HN Follow enables users to track specific authors on Hacker News and receive email notifications when they post. Inspired by similar tools like alerthn.com and hnreplies.com, the application was built on Val Town as an experimental demonstration of a new web platform. Users can write, run, fork, and install the app, with options to customize it further by modifying the source code for different use cases beyond author tracking.

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 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…

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  • HF
    HN Follow – email alerts from your friends on Hacker News2022 · hnfollow.com · ▲25

    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…

  • HF
    HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN2014 · hn-follow.desh.es · ▲76
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    Meet.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…

  • I built an interactive HN SimulatorNov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run · ▲538

    Hey HN! Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator. You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly. The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit. You don't need an account to post. When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link. I really wanted it to feel…

  • HN Follow2014 · ▲69

    Follow your friends on Hacker News

  • My recommendation engine for Hacker News2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · ▲314

    Hi! 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…

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