Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A better Hacker News front end
I forked pajecawav's better-hn repo, which turned out to be an excellent foundation to build on. While the original implementation was clean and functional, it didn't quite capture the essence of Hackernews. More importantly, it was missing some features I considered essential for a truly viable alternative. After tinkering with it for a while, I think I've nailed it—at least for my own use case. If it works well for me, chances are others might find it useful too. So I figured, why not share it? Pretty straightforward: no ads, no tracking, no monetization schemes and no intention to do so.…
A Better Hacker News Front End is an alternative interface for browsing Hacker News, built by forking and improving an existing implementation. It adds missing features to create a more complete reading experience… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier.
- 1
Hey HN, I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Hacker News design. I previously launched Modern for Wikipedia [1] here back in December, and it seemed like the obvious next choice to build one for HN too! So I've taken what I learned from building that, and have spent all my spare time this year building Modern for HN. I realize this won't be for everyone, but it was a fun project to work on, and I'm really happy with the result so far. Hope you like it too! Lots more planned for future updates, and suggestions welcome :) [1]…
2022 · modernhn.com · its alternatives →
- 2
I love HN but always felt the search with algolia is okay but does have some limitations. Since I work at Vectara I decided to try and create a better search for HN. It's based on data from roughly the last 6 months of HN stories and comments. Would love to hear feedback and how useful this is relative to the existing search.
2024 · hackernews.demo.vectara.com · its alternatives →
- 3
2022 · sbhn.g1b.me · its alternatives →
- 4
✨ Hacker News, but refined — Interface tweaks and features to make the HN experience better - plibither8/refined-hacker-news
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
HN is great for the links people share, but a big part of the value I get comes from reading the discussion around them. I realized I was always opening the article in one tab and the comments in another, constantly switching back and forth. I figured there was probably a simpler way, so I threw together this userscript to merge the two. 1. Clicking a link from Hacker News opens the article with a side panel containing the discussion. It doesn't require your credentials, is resizable, and is easy to tweak if you want to customize it. 2. If you land on an article that has previously been…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
A beautiful, clean, modern web UI for Hacker News
2022 · modernhn.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Hi folks, I've built an alternative Hacker News front page. It is inspired by and meant to be a replacement for hckrnews.com. I built this because HN is woefully underfeatured, but most sites that try to improve it seem to assume that the visual design is the problem. hcker.news tries to maintain HN's familiarity while adding useful enhancements. There are three primary views: - Timeline View: Browse top stories by votes or comments grouped by day, week, or month (e.g., top 20 per day, top 100 per week). - Aggregate View: See top stories by votes or comments over custom time ranges. - Front…
2025 · hcker.news · its alternatives →
- 8IB
2020 · hn.luap.info · its alternatives →
- 9HN
2014 · hilapeleg.io · its alternatives →
- 10
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…
2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · its alternatives →
- 11
Hi folks this is a project I worked on with some of my students when I was running an online JS programming course. Although the online course is no more, I finally got around to releasing Hacker Herald with a former instructor and student - thanks Arnav and Archis! To those wondering if there is a need for such a Hacker News front end, I would just point out that most newspaper websites are laid out like this - clearly some people like this kind of layout! Also for some stories a picture really does help - currently there is a HN story titled, "Portland airport grows with expansive mass…
2024 · hackerherald.com · its alternatives →
- 12HN
I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
2024 · hn.moritz.pm · its alternatives →
- 13
Hacker News, without AIfree▲207A better Hacker News reader for following stories, filtering noise, and keeping up with discussions.
Sep 2026 · hcker.news · its alternatives →
- 14AH
Hey folks, http://dstill.ai/hackernews is alternative frontend for Hacker News, with some features on top: (1) AI powered summarizations. Summaries are generated for the link, for the post and for the discussion. Summaries are automatically generated for selected top stories, but you can also generate them on demand — currently this requires supplying your own OpenAI api key (which gets stored in your browser in localStorage). When you generate a summary, everyone else can see it and benefits from it as well. Here are some examples: Summary of a long discussion:…
2023 · dstill.ai · its alternatives →
- 15
The Hacker News front page, with a short video explainer for every story.
25d ago · hn.watch · its alternatives →
- 16
Hey HN! I'm excited to share a tool I've been working on - a native Hacker News reader built with Rust and egui. Here's a screenshot: https://github.com/haojiang99/hacker_news_reader/blob/main/s.... As a daily HN reader, I've always struggled with keeping track of interesting posts I want to read later. Browser tabs pile up, bookmarks get forgotten, and I lose track of what I've already read. I needed a way to: 1. Browse HN efficiently (across all sections - hot, new, show, ask, jobs, best) 2. Quickly mark posts as "todo" for later reading 3. Mark posts as…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
I've been working on and off on a Chrome Extension for Hacker News, the extension focusses on improved usability rather than design. I can almost guarantee that after a day you won't want to go back to regular Hacker News. Give it a try, features include: - Improved readability - Quick inline replies from comments page - Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames - Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user - Endless scrolling - Collapsible comment threads - Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer Forks, improvements and comments…
2012 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →
- 18FH
Hi HN! I’ve been lurking for a while, but out of fear of being steamrolled by HN readers or maybe just natural introversion, I’ve always been too scared to post or comment. Which is why 1. this is my first real Hacker News submission 2. my friend Michael and I built "Fake" Hacker News, a place to post and see what AI-generated HN comments might say. Here’s a video of me using fakeHN to test this very submission: https://www.loom.com/share/4b9f4f9d7c77489a86baeb92ec55a1ed?... And an example of one of our generated posts:…
2023 · fakehn.com · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20FH
Hey HN. I created this website. https://pj4533.com/hn-overlooked/ It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this. I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I…
2025 · pj4533.com · its alternatives →
- 21FT
2016 · hackernewsfilter.com · its alternatives →
- 22
It's been 2 years since the initial release [here](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36102610). The initial version was a very basic prototype which was not available anywhere beyond the GitHub repo. You had to install it as a userscript or load the extension manually. Since then, it remained simple but better, new features include: - Improved accuracy by also using comments to help gauge the topic of discussion and the right keywords. - Published as plugin for more browsers: Chrome, Firefox (including android), and more recently Microsoft Edge. - Support for narrow screens…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Hacker News, Without AIfree▲197Source: https://github.com/leiDnedyA/hn-without-ai
Sep 2026 · unslop.news · its alternatives →
- 24
Hello HN! TLDR; - Quality News is a Hacker News client that provides additional data and insights on submissions, notably, the upvoteRate metric. - We propose that this metric could be used to improve the Hacker News ranking score. - In-depth explanation: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme The Hacker News ranking score is directly proportional to upvotes, which is a problem because it creates a feedback loop: higher rank leads to more upvotes leads to higher rank, and so on... → ↗ ↘ Higher Rank More Upvotes ↖ ↙ ← As a consequence, success on HN depends almost…
2023 · news.social-protocols.org · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →