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Show HN: 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 January[2].
We’re trying to strike the right balance between something you can use and install with one click, and something you can infinitely customize. For example, you could fork `@rodrigoTello.hnFollowApp`[3] and change the input parameter from authors to a generic query, like I do here[4] to get notifications whenever “val town” is mentioned on HN. In addition to emailing myself (via `console.email`), I also send a message to our team’s Discord. The possibilities are endless, but it can also be overwhelming. We’re trying to find the balance where we help you navigate the space of possible integrations, without limiting you the way a no-code tool would. We would really appreciate your guys’ feedback and suggestions!
[1] - HN Follow, first launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33533830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33533830
[2] - Val Town launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34343122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34343122
[3] - `@rodrigotello.hnFollowApp`: https://www.val.town/v/rodrigotello.hnFollowApp https://www.val.town/v/rodrigotello.hnFollowApp
[4] - My fork of hnFollow: https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse.hnValTown https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse.hnValTown
- PaulHoule 3y ago… that’s a lot of email isn’t it?
- stevekrouse 3y agoDepends who you follow, right?
- mjdowney 3y agoOut of curiosity, any plans on adding push notification primitives?
- stevekrouse 3y agoWe go back and forth on what we should add to the platform vs encourage you to do for yourself. For example, you can do this yourself fairly easily with ntfy.sh: https://www.val.town/v/axelav.sendNotification https://www.val.town/v/axelav.sendNotification But wouldn't it be even nicer to have `console.push` in the platform and it'd then prompt you to accept notifications right from our desktop or mobile website? Maybe soon!
- PaulHoule 3y agoI am always hearing from people who'd like to know when somebody replies to one of their comments. It seems like a notification system for Hacker News could be interesting in general. It's not particularly hard to write a script that follows new posts and comments but I'm not so sure how you pick up edits other than just running slow enough that you fetch stuff after the edit window has expired.
- ra7 3y agoYou can use https://www.hnreplies.com https://www.hnreplies.com to get notified when someone replies to your comments.
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoGod bless Dan Grossman keeping this open and running wherever he is: hnreplies.com
- akkartik 3y agoSpeaking as a heavy user and inbox 0 person, the rule I use for these emails is "skim then delete".
- cj 3y agoJust curious, how do you prevent/mitigate abuse or spam in a cloud scripting environment like this?
- stevekrouse 3y agoGreat question! Andrew Healey wrote a great blog post about sandboxing, particularly related to us: https://healeycodes.com/sandboxing-javascript-code https://healeycodes.com/sandboxing-javascript-code And we recently launched more secure semantics: https://blog.val.town/blog/restricted-library-mode https://blog.val.town/blog/restricted-library-mode But in the general case, it's a hard, never-ending cat-and-mouse game, particularly with free and unauthenticated use. We will eventually probably need to restrict use severely unless you have somehow proved you're a real person (ie connect to your github account) or are a paying customer.
- rubenfiszel 3y agoOla from windmill.dev which has some overlap but is focused on enterprise and self-hosted infra. We have exactly the same issues for the cloud and ended up securing everything through nsjail and the deno run sandboxing. I admire that you're willing to allow unauthentified users to run computations. Do you guys have timeout ? How do you ensure resource isolation? We use kubernetes for resource isolation, and we use both timeouts and quotas where each second a background process will kill the job if the user/job is over it. Let me know if you guys are up to chat at some point and congrats on the very nice UX.
- stevekrouse 3y agoWindmill is very cool! Reminds me a bit of pipedream.com too, but it's cool that you guys are open-source and self-hostable. Yeah we have a timeout, but will likely need to continue to add restrictions as we scale and get more abuse. We are mostly relying on deno's workers to isolate user code, but will probably add additional process isolation soon, and dedicated private resources for serious customers one day. Would love to chat & share tips! Email me? steve@val.town
- tomrod 3y agoI like the idea. I worry it will result in skewed incentives affecting content if widely adopted (i.e. LinkedInSanity)
- stevekrouse 3y agoWhat do you mean by LinkedInSanity?
- WaitWaitWha 3y ago> Remove filler, upsells, click bait and other low or negative-value annoyances. https://github.com/taylr/linkedinsanity https://github.com/taylr/linkedinsanity
- tomrod 3y agoMis-remembered the phrase, it's /r/LinkedInLunatics. Thanks for the callout!
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoI still prefer your instinctive recollection; “LinkedInSanity” is a much better name.
- quaintdev 3y agoHow about an app that shows a list of friends like below pg(3) cj(4) stevekrouse(2) Each of above name is hyperlinked and leads to a page where I can see all their updates. The count in bracket let's me know how many updates they have. This is not necessarily a suggestion for this app. I wish more social media apps adopted this approach instead of current time hogging feeds.
- stevekrouse 3y agoThis is a cool idea too! The easiest thing to do here would be to schedule it to run daily or weekly instead of hourly. But you can also build this aggregation thing too on Val Town. Lmk if you want a hand with that!
- gnicholas 3y ago“When they post” Does this include comments, or just posting submissions? IMO the former would be overkill for email notifications, and the latter would be not terribly useful.
- stevekrouse 3y agoIt includes both. I just made a forked version that takes an extra `tags` parameter that lets you customize which kinds of posts you want to subscribe to: https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse.hnFollowApp https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse.hnFollowApp You can see all the tag types (and other search options) here: https://hn.algolia.com/api https://hn.algolia.com/api Happy to help you customize it however you'd like :)
- toomuchtodo 3y agoDo you have an option to opt out of being followed?
- stevekrouse 3y agoNo, sorry. It's just polling HN via the Agolia API, so if you post on HN publicly, anyone can poll for that data.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- haswell 3y agoIs there anything preventing you from adding an opt-out feature? Yes, anyone can poll, but releasing a product that polls puts the onus on the product to honor the spirit of the site. I come here because the site doesn’t have all of the usual social media features, which is arguably part of how/why the community is still an interesting place to visit.
- 2023throwawayy 3y agoOff topic, but I would love the opposite of this. The ability to block certain HN users, just hide their comments entirely. Certain people have shown again and again they are not willing to have good faith arguments, and I simply don't care to be subjected to their nonsense.
- krapp 3y agoThere are browser plugins that will do this. I use one, it does wonders for my mental health.
- jedberg 3y agoThe downside to allowing blocking is that the site works best when you downvote that kind of content, because then everyone else doesn't have to be subjected to it. It's why we resisted a block feature on reddit for a long time. Because the site only works if bad stuff is downvoted.
- faffffaf 3y agoInteresting that many subreddits have removed downvoting, for a variety of reasons.
- all2 3y agoMY understanding of this community is that we strive to not be Reddit, especially from the discourse and moderation perspectives.
- pessimizer 3y agoMy understanding is that HN exists without reference to reddit, other than to ask people not to compare it to reddit again.
- codetrotter 3y agoOne of the problems for subreddits is people coming from the front page or from other subreddits, who are not part of the community of that subreddit, and begin to downvote things etc. HN is lucky in this regard; there is just one HN, not uncountable “sub-HNs”. Of course people can still come from other places to HN. But to earn downvote privileges here you first need some amount of karma. So hopefully this makes it so that downvote privileges on HN are mostly handed to people who are at least somewhat aligned with the broader community here.
- _8j50 3y agoI am sure there are bots/people that follow their enemies and downvote lol. Everytime I post something unpopular, I get my non-controversial posts downvoted predictably for some time. Or maybe that's just shadow moderation.
- aejae 3y agoGot to say, the H1 on the main landing page is amazing.
- stevekrouse 3y agothanks!
- avgcorrection 3y agoI could never be friends with someone who posts on HN.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoI don't understand your comment; I have several real-life friends who have accounts here (and normally I discover it by accident, and we don't exchange our nicknames as everybody would try to pretend we enjoy some semi-anonimity here).
- aaronharnly 3y agoIt's kind of a variant of https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/04/18/groucho-resigns/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/04/18/groucho-resigns/
- nhatcher 3y agoThey are paraphrasing " I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member!"
- valianteffort 3y agoGP was being sardonic
- nashashmi 3y agoRight. They would have nothing different to offer other than what you have already gained from here. I found out this the hard way after coming across someone who posted on hn.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoNow, the really scary option would be to automatically correlate HN accounts with other accounts and pieces of text based on the previous work done in this area to find alternative HN accounts (that was already awkward enough).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- orliesaurus 3y agoWhy did you choose to build this on Val.town?
- stevekrouse 3y agoWe're the creators of Val Town ;)
- zoogeny 3y agoJust some random feedback on the val.town interface. The concept is interesting but I have one gripe. I want to know what the code I'm about to run will do and I notice the pretty unique `@stevekrouse.hnLatestPosts` type interface where it looks like you can reference functions. But this leads to a deep chain of reference. Like, that function leads to `@stevekrouse.hnSearch` which leads to `@stevekrouse.fetchJSON` which leads to `@stevekrouse.normalizeURL`, etc. There is some kind of DAG of dependencies that is invisible to me. I'm wondering what could be done from a UI perspective here? Like, maybe a tree view where each node is expandable? Right now it just pops open a new browser tab and I end up with context spread across multiple tabs. The concept of composable references is powerful but I think the UX could be improved.
- Alifatisk 3y agoYou mean like how github does in their search page? You hover click on a method and a side panel shows up with source code of that method
- alan-stark 3y agoWhat's the value of bringing Facebook/Instagram mechanics into HN? Wouldn't that skew social dynamics away from egalitarianism, giving rise to "influencers", social bubbles and rise in clickbait? I think that not having a 'follow your friends' mechanism is a feature of HN.
- jfengel 3y agoI want the opposite of that: "This guy is an asshole and I just don't want to see him ever again."
- hoosieree 3y agoI have this half-baked idea for an anti-social media website where the only way to "engage" is by blocking people.
- NikkiA 3y agoI mean, reddit is half way there, they just need to increase the pathetic limit of 1000 blocked users.
- jfengel 3y agoSome years ago I wanted to create LinkedOut. It was a privacy-conscious web site, where you couldn't spill any secrets because it wouldn't take any information. You got your page, which was blank, and stayed blank. A very anti-social network. I'm pretty sure the domain name was taken already.
- aziaziazi 3y agoGreat idea! What about fade-away hnstyle with a color teint? Maybe updating à gist with Val Town and referencing that gist from a css file with Stylish? Or another way js only… Edit: some can hack it to tint people they like.
- lb4r 3y ago3-minute uBlock script: news.ycombinator.com##:xpath(//span[contains(@class, 'comhead')]/a[contains(@href, 'user?id=USERNAME')]/ancestor::td[contains(@class, 'default')]) Replace USERNAME with the user you don't want to see. Edit: it only works on comments, but you can just as easily make one that hides their submissions as well.
- garbagecoder 3y agoOrange Reddit is real.
- slushh 3y agoThe val.town idea is very promising but I think it's not as social as it could be. The val.town page is dedicated to developers and convinces with features. What I am missing is content. The explore page [1] has popular functions, which are the content of val.town, but they are not content in a social sense. HN and reddit engage users before they make an account. It's very good that I can run code without making an account. But I have to interact and think before I am hooked. Could users be hooked on content? I could imagine a landing page on a second domain that would show the result of scripts that users vote to the top. (Of course the knowledge would lie in preventing dick pics.) Adding votes should also be possible for the explore page itself. HN/newest is not as convincing as the ranked HN frontpage. A short Readme section and a result section would make the code more approachable. The UX seems to be choosing precision over smoothness. Trying the HN Top Story in /explore, it's surprising that the result is just the title, without a link. To change that, I would prefer if a simple click on the function would directly allow me to edit the function. The ctrl-click with the new tab works, but it doesn't feel right. [1] https://www.val.town/explore https://www.val.town/explore
- Alifatisk 3y agoI like the idea of val.town, each snippet is isolated and can reference to other snippets & packages. One thing I wish was that other runtimes would be shipped aswell, like Ruby. But I understand that maintaing such runtime is a burden. I know that Vercel supports Ruby as serverless runtime though, so I know it’s possible. Other than that, I think val.town will boom in popularity soon. It’s a unique idea.