Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Better HN – Realtime Comment Updates and Cleaner Look
I'm sharing a userscript for for those who read the HN comments section a lot: 1. Updates comments without reloading the page — instantly see new ones as they appear. 2. Cleaner comment topline for less distraction — shows controls only when you hover over the topline. There is a preview gif of how it looks in the README.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 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 →
- 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
Little chrome extension I made to collapse comments on HN, feel free to use it if you want.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4HR
2016 · hnreplies.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Hello HN, I was away from my computer for two weeks, and after coming back and reading the latest discussions on HN about coding assistants (models, harnesses), I felt very out of the loop. My normal process would have been to keep reading and figure out the latest and greatest from people's comments, but I wanted to try and automate this process. Basically the goal is to get a quick overview over which coding models are popular on HN. A next iteration could also scan for harnesses that people use, or info on self-hosting or hardware setups. I wrote a short intro on the page about the…
2024 · hnup.date · its alternatives →
- 6
- 7EH
2016 · comments.network · its alternatives →
- 8
A chrome extension that applies a stylesheet to Hacker News' frontpage. - guicoelho/hn-beautify
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9T1
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 →
- 10NC
http://mindovermatter.it/ Just a quick and dirty hack I did while learning Go and how to set up an EC2 server. A proof of concept for a feature I think it would be useful on HN. It often happens that I read the whole thread of comments for a discussion, and get back to it at a later time to see the updates. It's hard to see at a glance which comments are new and which ones I already read. The app uses cookies to record the last time you accessed a discussion thread, and modify the html in order to highlight the new comments (the ones added since your last GET of the page).…
2013 · its alternatives →
- 11
Hacker News comments sidebar bookmarklet. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
2023 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
I have a dedicated HN tab that I come back to and reload multiple times a day to see whats new and hot. I wrote a Chrome Extension to: - quickly scan new articles since my last reload - quickly scan highly discussed articles - open actual articles and discussions in a new tab This links to the source code. The chrome extension is linked at the bottom of the github page. Note: - This extension only operates on the HN front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/news) - The first time you reload the HN front page after installing the extension all articles will get highlighted.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
2013 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14AT
Hi HN, I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here. Three things in this post: 1- The interesting groups of HN posts 2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser 3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles. Blog post about this whole process here: [1] ============ 1- The interesting groups of HN posts From the…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 15
This is a userscript that you can use with Tampermonkey, or paste it to JS console. I generated it with o1-preview, simply by pasting the HTML source of a HN page to the prompt and asking it to make a comment updating script. And it worked flawlessly — great job, OpenAI! I'm impressed. What a time to be alive! The prompt: https://chatgpt.com/share/66eb36c5-a55c-8005-9ee1-d42770297d... The script fetches new comments every 10 seconds and inserts them to a proper place in the DOM, highlighting them with a nice color. With this script, HN feels like a realtime chat in busy…
2024 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
2010 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →
- 17
2021 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey HN, I made this tool after I read a pretty interesting pg essay - http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html He talks about changing some HN usernames' colors to orange and then deciding to revert back So I thought it could be interesting to remove usernames entirely. This Chrome Extension just replaces HN usernames with question marks. I've enjoyed using it so far myself and I'm curious what you think about the concept?
2022 · hackerwhos.com · its alternatives →
- 19SO
2016 · perfil.med.br · its alternatives →
- 20
Sticks the first line of all comments in the visible comment tree to the top of the screen so you always know where exactly you are. See the screenshots for a better understanding. Also adds the ability to expand/collapse a comment by clicking anywhere on it.
2021 · greasyfork.org · its alternatives →
- 21
2011 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22HN
Daily original takes and guides.
2011 · hnnotify.com · its alternatives →
- 23
HN Notifier is a chrome extension that shows the number of unread comments to your HackerNews thread. One of the issues with HackerNews is that it is difficult to know when someone has replied to your post or comment, thus by missing an opportunity to continue the conversation. - meanands/hn-notifie
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
UserScript: Indicate New/Unread HN stories on front page since your last visit. - Hacker_News_Story_Rank_Change_Indicator.user.js
2024 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript alternatives
- I built an interactive HN Simulator alternatives
- Collapse HN Comments alternatives
- HN Replies – Get notified of replies to your comments alternatives
- HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories alternatives
- HN Comments Owl alternatives
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 →