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I want to draw particular attention to the use case of following HN users. I've been using it for a couple of months, and been finding a lot more great comments

I want to draw particular attention to the use case of following HN users. I've been using it for a couple of months, and been finding a lot more great comments here as a result. There's a separate front-end that's the best way to get started following people: https://www.hnfollow.com https://www.hnfollow.com. And if you find yourself wishing it worked slightly differently for you, well you can go edit the underlying Val then. Hit me up if you would like help setting this up for yourself and don't want to join the Discord or something. My email is in my profile. You basically need to create a new Val for yourself called `hackerNewsAuthors` that's just an array of HN username strings.

stevekrouse 4y ago
The backstory here is that when we saw how akkartik was using the tool, we decided to double down on this particular usecase and we built hnfollow.com as a showcase of what could be done with the tool, but holding your hand every step of the way. We even posted it to HN but dang rightly rerouted us to this proper Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33533830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33533830 In the meantime, we launched "Scheduled Val" which let you schedule a val with a single click, and it somewhat made hnfollow.com unnecessary because most of that tool helped you manage setting up an interval, tracking its ID, and cancelling it. Now you can just fork this single val to your account and the interval is synced to the val automatically: https://www.val.town/stevekrouse.hnFollowPollJob https://www.val.town/stevekrouse.hnFollowPollJob The one extra step that akkartik alludes to is also important: you do need to define some folks to follow. How to handle-hold users through this process of forking + customizing vals is a real design challenge for us. Would love any suggestions!

stevekrouse 4y ago

The backstory here is that when we saw how akkartik was using the tool, we decided to double down on this particular usecase and we built hnfollow.com as a showcase of what could be done with the tool, but holding your hand every step of the way. We even posted it to HN but dang rightly rerouted us to this proper Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33533830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33533830 In the meantime, we launched "Scheduled Val" which let you schedule a val with a single click, and it somewhat made hnfollow.com unnecessary because most of that tool helped you manage setting up an interval, tracking its ID, and cancelling it. Now you can just fork this single val to your account and the interval is synced to the val automatically: https://www.val.town/stevekrouse.hnFollowPollJob https://www.val.town/stevekrouse.hnFollowPollJob The one extra step that akkartik alludes to is also important: you do need to define some folks to follow. How to handle-hold users through this process of forking + customizing vals is a real design challenge for us. Would love any suggestions!