Alternatives
Products that do what A subreddit dedicated to beta-reading does
(it's naked and will stay naked for at least a week or two) There are stuff like Discord or Scribophile, which can provide good opportunites, but it's such a mess and sometimes it can be frustrating - for both parties. So, r/betareading is meant to become a platform for both parties to meet and exchange freely. I'll have more free time soon to work on the subreddit and promote it. Probably will add guidelines for both writers and beta-readers. Because a writer can name the genre of his text and his length, but beta-readers skills should be categorized and made public: from grammar to…
- 1IS
Hi everyone, For the past couple months I've been working on a website with two main features: - https://book.sv - put in a list of books and get recommendations on what to read next from a model trained on over a billion reviews - https://book.sv/intersect - put in a list of books and find the users on Goodreads who have read them all (if you don't want to be included in these results, you can opt-out here: https://book.sv/remove-my-data) Technical info available here: https://book.sv/how-it-works Note 1: If you only provide one or two…
Nov 2025 · book.sv
- 2IS
Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.
2013 · github.com
- 3
- 4PR
Hi HN, I've had the idea for a scholarly publishing site that could crowdsource the work of the journals using concepts borrowed from Github and StackExchange and recombined for years. I finally got enough runway to take about 6 months off of work to build it. This is the result. It's still in beta, but the core MVP features - review, reputation, responses - are all there. I'm sure there are as yet to be found bugs, because I'm on my own and I've always been terrible at testing my own stuff. Right now it's best treated as non-archival pre-prints with review. I'm starting my next full time…
2023 · peer-review.io
- 5EL
Hey HN! I'd love to get some people to mess around with a little side project I built to teach myself DSPy! I've been a big fan of reading fiction + webnovels for a while now, and have always been curious about two things: how can LLMs iteratively learn to write better based on reader feedback, and which LLMs are actually best at creative writing (research benchmarks are cool, but don't necessarily translate to real-world usage). That's exactly why I built narrator.sh! The platform takes in a user input for a novel idea, then generates serialized fiction chapter-by-chapter by using DSPy to…
2025 · narrator.sh
- 6SA
Hey guys, I made a post about this about a week ago and was told to create a Show HN post. So here we are! Squabblr is a hybrid that takes Twitter style posting and combines it with Reddit style commenting. It came up from a personal want where I liked using Twitter to see what people I'm interested in are up to, but found that the reply system left a lot to be desired. It's very hard to have or follow conversations with their UI. While Reddit provided a great commenting system but didn't support following people very well (or had much usage of it at all). So I decided to create Squabblr.…
2023 · squabblr.co
- 7SA
Hello HN, My name is Deepak. I've created this platform (https://stackcrunch.io) where developers can share their experiences in form of short stories linked to real-world practical solutions on Q&A platforms. This project is currently in early access mode, where you can check out the platform & start writing your stories. Also, please do check out the launch article and how to create a story at https://stackcrunch.io/posts I'd love to hear back from the community. Warm Regards, Deepak
2018
- 8SS
TLDR: The beta of my my site, Sparkmuse, has begun. Please join me at http://www.sparkmuse.com/invitation/Hacker-News . The Story: Well here it is, the beta of Sparkmuse. I'm pretty happy to "get there", but I'm really just relieved. Don't get me wrong, I'm F'ING STOKED to get this in front of some more valuable eyeballs, especially the Hacker News crowd. Right now though, I'm just leaning back in a rickety old chair thinking "I did it." Several months ago I was pretty down on myself. I wanted to get out there and meet new people, do cool projects, explore new technologies, and just jump…
2011
- 9AI
This is a first draft of an app that I am working on that is the "anti blinkist (the book summarization app)". I call it Augre (aug-ur - short for augmented reader) and the whole idea is that I want to immerse more, not less in a book. I want to dive deeper into the text, chat with others who are reading the book and get into delicious discussions. It's still early but here are a couple of features: 1. A really solid cross platform epub reader 2. Left sidebar which augments the reading experience with tables, images, maps (and other artifacts coming soon) 3. Book chat where you can chat with…
2025
- 10MP
Midnight is a side-project I've been working on for the past year, but only released in alpha a month ago. It aims to be the web equivalent of your local pub: a place you can go to and talk about your day with strangers or friends. It's heavily inspired by write.as (for simplicy) and Roam (for bi-directional linking). My hope is that it fosters creative writing as well as typical pub discussions. You can read more about it and the concept on https://midnight.pub Here are some example of interesting stories written: https://midnight.pub/e/269435632215917061…
2020
- 11AB
Recently, I found myself having to read the book "C++ primer" and I just couldn't do it. Maybe my attention span is too little now with Claude and Codex, maybe I'm lazy... but I just couldn't get myself to focus. While reading, I needed something to do. I wanted to talk to the text, I wanted to leave notes, I wanted to use to use my keyboard to quickly flip through pages. The only good available option on a Mac was "Preview" and it was ok, but definitely not there. So I built Quincy primarily for myself. With it you can - "Talk" to the page you're reading, create a quiz about the page, and…
Jun 2026 · tryquincy.live
- 12IB
Hey so I am making my own book reader and wanted to share it with y'all on hackernews and I saw a submission talking about DRM free books[0] so I decided to submit this submission on Hackernews to show what I am upto :-D I prefer minimalism so I have created three different flavors of it depending upon the particular use-cases and I have linked the most minimalist one as the submission. If someone is interested in a Epub/pdf reader, I have recently made one: https://epub.mirror.forum/ After making that, I was also feeling the need of having standard book downloads and…
Jun 2026 · epub.mirror.forum
- 13AC
I built ProRead to prevent stalling on long passages and to keep the overall context clear. Features * Bird’s-eye overview with drill-down to any level * Interactive maps showing concept links * Quick switch between chapter summaries and original text * Contextual AI Q\&A * Text-to-speech for any book or summary level * EPUB upload for instant access Includes nine classics (Wealth of Nations, Crime and Punishment, etc.) and support for your own books. I arrived at this by piecing together LLM-based workflows for reading until I decided to build a dedicated tool. Feedback welcome.
2025 · proread.ai
- 14AC
Hey HN! For a while I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to find a community for tech bloggers to get together and share what they’re working on, so here’s my attempt at making my own. It’s a completely free website and designed to be super straightforward to use. Functionality wise it’s pretty minimalist right now, with just the ability to register accounts, post drafts, and comment on other user’s posts. Support for more features like tagging post topics, user profiles and more are coming soon! Thanks for checking it out, and I’d love to hear any thoughts from the community. P.S. if you don’t…
2024 · review.caleb.software
- 15IW
Hey HN, I wrote a short book about the fundamental aspects of Clojure. The target audience is programmers with at least minimal experience who want to learn how to express solutions in Clojure (and perhaps in LISP, generally). If the price is a bit too steep for you, send me an email (address in bio), and I'll provide a discount coupon. If you can't afford it all, and believe the material may help you for studying or interview preparations, I can send you a free copy.
2025 · leanpub.com
- 16EE
Hey, guys and girls :) Please notice, that my intention is not to advertise my project here, but to ask for your advice. Long story short: we've noticed that it's very hard to "sum-up" any idea on one page and share it without using a blogging platform. Let's say you want to collect and present your point of view on "IA reaserch". You can write a blogpost or use social media to share your opinion (that would reach limited amount of people though). We really missed a tool that allows you to embed a lot of different resources on one page and than to share it with one link. This way you can…
2013
- 17AW
Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com
- 18GF
2018 · ficdb.com
- 19BM
Hey HN crowd! Two days ago I realized I'm almost unable to read a book or a long article without getting distracted by Twitter/HN/Reddit/Work. The situation is so terrible, I'm even getting afraid of big articles, and my ReadItLater list is getting pretty long (shameful I know) ... and I'm pretty sure most of you are in this situation :) Being used to TL;DRs on long reddit posts, I thought it would be great to have these for everything, so I quickly hacked this website: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/ Here is an example of TL;DR: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/5tropy I would love to…
2011
- 20CA
Hi HN, We’ve been building CoLit, a platform for collaborative, community-driven writing. The idea came from a simple problem: me and my friends wanted to write fanfiction together, but no existing platform really worked. We ended up juggling Wattpad, Google Docs, Discord threads, and random notes just to piece a story together. Nothing felt built for actually co-writing. CoLit tries to solve that by making collaborative writing feel natural. You can start a project (story, fanfic, script, anything), and others can add contributions, vote on the next direction, remix stories, or help refine…
Nov 2025 · colit.app
- 21SA
Hey HN, A buddy and I have been working on a side project in the online community space in our free time over the past few years. Our platform is a sort of Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid. Decided to do a soft launch today in light of all the recent Reddit news. Community features: 1. Customizable discussion boards. Community owners can setup threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. Say a user creates a community for a niche like "Cars", under that community they could create different discussion boards for sub categories like "Car-mods", "Car-photos",…
2023 · sociables.com
- 22
- 23WC
Somebody said "Launch early, launch often", so I guess it's about time. WhatMyFriendsRead.com -- a social recommendation service for interesting links and content. Main idea: What is interesting for you is what your friends find interesting. I made a functional prototype hacked together in php+mysql with ugly html+css. But it works which is why I guess now would be a "launch early" moment. Or atleast show to a bunch of people for feedback :-) On the site your main source of links is from people you add as your friends or people you subscribe to. People you subscribe to provide you with links…
2011
- 24RA
2020 · readup.com
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