Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A HN desktop app for reading links and comments next to each other
This desktop application provides a streamlined way to browse Hacker News by displaying stories in a sidebar with the ability to view articles and their comments simultaneously on a split screen. Users can read full… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. A HN desktop app for reading links and comments next to each other launched in 2016; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
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 →
- 2ID
2013 · hackernewstab.com · its alternatives →
- 3
The Hacker News front page, with a short video explainer for every story.
25d ago · hn.watch · its alternatives →
- 4
- 5
Alerts, AI summaries, and easy search for Hacker News
2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Web Extension: Easily find Hacker News discussions about the page you're currently browsing. - pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Hacker News comments sidebar bookmarklet. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
2023 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
- 8IB
2020 · hn.luap.info · its alternatives →
- 9
HN Deck: An alternate way to browse Hacker News
2020 · hndeck.sagunshrestha.com · its alternatives →
- 10
- 11FH
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 →
- 12HN
2011 · hn.gethifi.com · its alternatives →
- 13
HN is all about the rich discussions. We wanted to take the HN experience one step further - to bring the familiar keyboard-first navigation, find interesting viewpoints in the threads and get a gist of long threads so that we can decide which rabbit holes to explore. So we built HN Companion a year ago, and have been refining it ever since. Try it: https://app.hncompanion.com or available as an extension for Firefox / Chrome: [0]. Most AI summarization strips the voices from conversations by flattening threads into a wall of text. This kills the joy of reading HN discussions.…
Feb 2026 · hncompanion.com · its alternatives →
- 14QAQ&A for HN users▲142
2012 · askolo.com · its alternatives →
- 15
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 →
- 16
Hacker News Delivered to Desktop :dancers:. Contribute to owenthereal/hacker-menu development by creating an account on GitHub.
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
A beautiful, clean, modern web UI for Hacker News
2022 · modernhn.com · its alternatives →
- 18SH
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 →
- 19
I thought building something that I would use while learning iOS SDK was a good idea so I built HN Browser. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hn-browser/id578535095?ls=1&mt=8 HN Browser is a simple app which lets you to read articles and comments on Hacker News. (no voting and writing comment yet) For the logo, I reached out to Joel Glovier(http://joelglovier.com) for his previous work on Hacker News logo(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4731140) and he kindly granted the use of his work. It was really fun experience to collaborate and build a mobile app using iOS SDK. (although…
2012 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 20
I was struggling with navigating HN discussions using existing solutions, so I decided to implement a completely different approach, think of it as depth-first reading vs breadth-first reading. Visually it looks like swipeable stacks of comments and it offers several advantages over traditional interfaces: - Comment width doesn't get narrower no matter how deep in the comment tree you are - You always see the parent of the comment you're currently reading - Swiping allows you to move in and out of subtrees with animated transitions that you fully control - You can easily skip subtrees that…
2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 21EH
2016 · comments.network · its alternatives →
- 22
2015 · hnreads.com · its alternatives →
- 23
- 24
sleeek tui for hacker news. Contribute to ahmd-sh/hntui development by creating an account on GitHub.
26d ago · github.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 →