val.town was built mostly pre-LLMs and it was basically lightweight typescript functions as a service. i thought they were doing ok, so i'm a bit surprised by this, but i do admit that I only ever used them for some throwaway toys

Also surprised.

It's like var town but it's not mutable.

Well it’s definitely not constant

I got this reference

Ba dum chah

in my days we had number town and char town and it was ok, nowadays im always getting lost with the youths in var an and def

search hn, theyve ranked very highly consistently over the years

Small web scripts that can email you and you can cron schedule them. They used to let you do this for free so I used it for web monitoring (like if a site restocks the product I want).

Maybe we should donate to cron-job.org

This is pretty much what I use my own thing for (https://tissue.systems, I'm the founder). JS function on a URL, sqlite and cron built in, so "check a page every hour and ping me" is one small file. No browser editor like Val Town had, it's deploy from a CLI. Happy to help if anyone wants to port a val over.

>I went to their homepage and I still can't tell what this is.

that's almost every VC-funded SaaS from the ZIRP era of incestuous circular money-wasting.