Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A Discord/Slack bot to watch HN comments
Some years ago, I discovered a bot called Little Birdie to watch HN comments for keywords and post a link to Slack. Unfortunately, it has disappeared and I've found myself missing this. So this bot is a re-implementation of it, but now also supporting Discord. It's very easy to use: 1. install the bot on your workspace/guild 2. /keywords add rust,hn,foobar (for Discord) ; @newsbutler add rust,hn,foobar (for Slack) 3. done For technical stuff : it is implemented in Crystal + Postgres (hosted on Render+Neon). I will certainly opensource it when I clean the repo of all production…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
Get a Slack message when you're mentioned on HN or Reddit
2017 · littlebirdie.io · its alternatives →
- 2
Hey HN! Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator. You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly. The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit. You don't need an account to post. When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link. I really wanted it to feel…
Nov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run · its alternatives →
- 3
Get Slack notifications for HN mentions
2022 · hn-slack-bot.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 4
Hey HN We loaded a BigQuery dataset of all of Hacker News, every comment, story and user, into camelAI. You can ask questions like: • “When does dang tend to comment during the day?” • “Which domains have gained the most submissions since 2015, year-over-year?” • “How has average comment length changed each January since 2007?” • “Top five users who link to arXiv papers the most.” It's behind a log-in to prevent abuse but free to use for 10 messages. No payment info required. We use OpenAI o3 or Claude sonnet 3.7 for the agent which can be really expensive. Would love feedback especially…
2025 · app.camelai.com · its alternatives →
- 5BA
It works on top of the open-source workflow engine windmill [1] that you can easily self-host on a tiny server or a large k8s cluster. You will also need pgvector (here hosted on supabase) and of course a GPT4 api key. It showcases an approval step so that you only provide answers you are confident giving to your users, which feels less robotic. All the building blocks are scripts that you can reuse outside of windmill and you could build this in any other workflow engines (although less conveniently). We use it for our own needs on discord [2] and thoughts this was a common need for any…
2023 · windmill.dev · its alternatives →
- 6HR
2016 · hnreplies.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Hi everyone, I build this bot to automate the process of going to wayback machine (or archive.ph) to find the archive link for posts with articles that have subscription blocks The idea was to have this run on a server and then I wouldn’t have this daily annoyance, the bot was banned, so its not currently active, but I still wanted to show it off and get some feedback Disclaimer : HN doesn't allow bots, so please don’t use this to run your own HN bot.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
2023 · zsync.xyz · its alternatives →
- 9EH
2016 · comments.network · its alternatives →
- 10
Your networking assistant inside Slack
2016 · brandsly.com · its alternatives →
- 11IW
It's inspired by this comment I made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26599746. I actually saw several comments with HTTP URL posted, and that was the only one I bothered to comment on. So I thought that this is something better suited for bots than human. I hacked this together over yesterday and today: https://github.com/fishy/https-bot. Basically it uses the Firebase API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API) to find comments with HTTP URLs in them, try the HTTPS version, compare the contents, post back a comment if the contents are…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 12
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 →
- 13
Finally brings visual discussions to Slack (by Codesign.io)
2016 · codesign.io · its alternatives →
- 14
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
- 16SH
I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…
2024 · searchhacker.news · its alternatives →
- 17
Hi HN, I hacked a simple service for gathering HN replies and organizing them by the parent's username. The main idea is to be able to efficiently get the latest replies to an HN user. For example, you can use this service to send yourself notifications when some replies to you on HN. The service queries the official HN API and can be self-hosted. It is basically ~30 lines of Bash script. I made this mostly for educational purposes -- thought you might find it useful for something. Cheers! Edit: for example, here are the latest replies to me [0]. It includes only recent replies, since I…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Whoa, a Slack command-line client inside Slack.
2016 · slack-metabot.herokuapp.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Many companies have a public Discord where people ask questions. Sometimes those questions are dumb and can be easily answered by reading the support documents. So we built a bot that does 3 things: 1. Uses FAISS to index public support documents provided as URLs 2. Monitors a Discord channel for questions, prefixed with !help 3. Responds to questions with its best guess of the right answer and cites its source document(s), using Data Augmented Generation from LangChain It won’t be right all of the time, but if people find it helpful we’ll make it better. Take a look at the repo and give us…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
- 21
HN Summary is an open source bot which sumarizes top stories on Hacker News and publishes the summaries to a Telegram channel. Whenever a new story appears on the Hacker News API /topstories.json endpoint, this bot summarizes it (currently using OpenAI GPT-3 text-davinci-002) and sends the story title, summary, and url to the hn_summary channel on Telegram. The purpose of this project is to help build intuition on the capabilities of the current generation of large language models while making a broader swath of top Hacker News content more easily accessible. It could also serve as a…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Amuse yourself or your slack team with a random joke
2016 · slack.com · its alternatives →
- 23T1
HN has some of the best discussions on the internet, but I don’t love reading 100 comments to find 10 great insights. This site analyzes top HN threads with LLMs and summarizes the key ideas, disagreements, and resources — while preserving links to the original discussion. Useful for revisiting old threads as well. Updated daily, manual-assisted for quality, no spam, fan project only. Would love thoughts from the community. https://hn-discussions.top
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 24
A Telegram bot that notifies you whenever a reply to your comments is posted on HN.
2021 · gitlab.com · 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 →