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.<p>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].<p>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.<p>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<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.notion.so/End-programmer-Programming-a749beb4a9b143f2990f575fb7e59b33" rel="nofollow">https://www.notion.so/End-programmer-Programming-a749beb4a9b...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://val.town" rel="nofollow">https://val.town</a><p>[3] - <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/878294970d8e48919c819f35d0cd0da4" rel="nofollow">https://www.loom.com/share/878294970d8e48919c819f35d0cd0da4</a><p>[4] - <a href="https://www.notion.so/Val-Town-Docs-01c8eb9c534b4899802f3a9e31d540ab" rel="nofollow">https://www.notion.so/Val-Town-Docs-01c8eb9c534b4899802f3a9e...</a><p>[5] - <a href="https://discord.gg/dHv45uN5RY" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/dHv45uN5RY</a>