Alternatives
Products that do what Cascade Chat – A Hackable IRCv3 Client for macOS, Windows, and Linux does
Hello HN! I'm Matt and today I'd like to show you Cascade Chat. One of my earliest internet experiences was with mIRC. I always admired its straightforward, pleasant UI and the way it wove a hackable core into the code. The way you could build on the visual and API layers of the underlying IRC client to me was fascinating software machinery. It was truly a client that you could build on top of. As my career has progressed, I moved away from Windows and adopted Linux as my daily driver. That was where I found HexChat, the closest thing I could find to mIRC many years later. While I really…
- 1IL
Hello HN, I want to share something that I worked on for quite a while as my side project - www.heahy.com an IRC like chat where you can share various media and even record yourself (using web MediaRecorder api). Here is a thread with short explanation on how it works: https://www.heahy.com/channel/homepage/thread/3900adb9e441a09abc757461 I am looking for any feedback and if you have any ideas, advice or questions I am eager to hear it here or on heahy!
2020
- 2
- 3IC
Hi HN, Long-time IRC obsessive here (some of you may remember me from the privacy wars and the freenode drama). My commitment to the protocol never died, so I built IRC.com, a browser-based IRC client where everything lives in user-editable JavaScript. The core ships with just a protocol shim and window manager; the rest is scriptable. Out of the box it feels like a normal IRC client, but if you want to automate channel ops, invent new commands, or redesign the UI, the power is yours. I’d love your feedback, bug reports, and feature ideas... especially from fellow IRC lifers! I'll be adding…
2025 · irc.com
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- 5AO
2013 · github.com
- 6SA
2012 · github.com
- 7MW
I always find myself frustrated by how many steps I have to take to video chat with someone online. There's always too much software to download and install, and too many accounts to remember. The high-end, high-price Cisco conferencing systems I've used are especially fragile. So I built Vidless in a weekend for myself, and I hope you find it useful too. Just create a room and share the link, and you'll be chatting in seconds. You can invite several people (I haven't really tested a max yet), and chats on Vidless are always private. Enjoy!
2012 · vidless.com
- 8NP
I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
2014 · urshoutbox.com
- 9HN
I'm Seth, creator of discourse.fm, a browser-based tool/platform to create live audio chat rooms. I just launched an extension of the site - https://hackernews.discourse.fm/ - which pulls stories in real-time from the HN site using the public API, and enables anyone to join a live audio discussion about the story (think Clubhouse rooms autogenerated for HN stories). Once you enter a room, you can grab the link generated for a room and paste it back to the comments on the HN story to invite more participants. hackernews.discourse.fm is both a full-fledged product and a…
2021
- 10CR
Hey HN, what I wanted to build here is a proper universal layer for persisted agentic sessions, that could be seamlessly interacted both via web and a messenger (Telegram). I really like what's done so far and would be nice to hear some feedback from you. The interesting thing is that I started to use Chatcode during its development as soon it was possible, so used this tool to build itself. I know that there could be trust/privacy concerns, because it relies on a gateway that you need to install on your machine in order to work, but: 1. You can use it on any machine, just have some…
Jun 2026 · chatcode.dev
- 11HN
I recently received access to develop and use ChatGPT plugins, and embarked on a project to build a Hacker News integration as a learning exercise. My goal was to enable retrieval of content from HN to answer questions and produce insights in conversations with ChatGPT. I documented my journey in this blog post, which will hopefully be helpful to other plugin developers or anyone looking to learn more about embeddings. You can try the experience even if you don't have plugin access on ChatGPT through the demo on hn.kix.in - it's a loose approximation but should give you a sense of what's…
2023 · kix.in
- 12GS
This weekend I finally shipped Gryt, a project I’ve been building since 2022 — an open-source, self-hostable Discord-style app focused on reliable voice chat + text. I’m the creator. I started it after getting fed up with Discord disconnects/paywalls and wanted something self-hosted and auditable. I started on this in 2022 and had an early proof-of-concept working back then (auth + friends list), but I quickly realized WebRTC voice isn’t something you can duct-tape together. I spent a big chunk of the next couple years learning the stack (ICE/DTLS-SRTP, NAT traversal, SFU design),…
Feb 2026 · gryt.chat
- 13CP
I’m Pranav, co-founder of Chatwoot (https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot), an open-source alternative to Intercom and Zendesk. What started as a passion project in 2019, gained a lot of momentum recently. This was possible because of all the contributions and love we got from the community. We’ve created a page (https://contributors.chatwoot.com) to showcase our contributors’ work and give them a platform to share their contributions with the world. We open-sourced this little project too. We’ve made our repo for other open-source projects to use it as a…
2022
- 14CU
I would love to hear what you guys think?
2013 · chatasaur.us
- 15CS
I have just launched a project that has been sitting on my hard drive 80% finished for the better part of a year. http://www.chatroulettespy.com It detects your 'anonymous' chat partner's IP address and performs a geolocation lookup on it to show the user the partner's approximate location on a map. I know the Chatroulette fad has peaked a long time ago (when I started this project), but there are still many people using it and its many clones. It was important for me to follow through on this one and not let it die on my hard drive like many projects before. I would appreciate any feedback…
2011
- 16HA
Hello HN! Here's my November Startup Sprint project (coded in two days). http://hackerlunch.com It allows you to post your lunch plans and lets other hackers join you. I built this because I often see HN users are interested in meeting each other if they are in the same area. I am not a coder, so this version is very rough. If people use it, I will work with others to build a more polished version. I would love some feedback. What do you think? Is this something you will be using?
2010
- 17BA
2020 · github.com
- 18IT
I have hosted my own IRC server, for a small community of coders and friends, since 1999. I never really strayed from using mirc or irssi, when I'm on a desktop or have a keyboard. On my iphone, the options were pretty lacking, though. The best true IRC client for iphone is one called IRC999, in my opinion. These clients all bugged me though because when the phone would go idle or shut off the wifi, the client disconnects. Sometime in early December, an idea hit me about an IRC client that would function sort of like Twitter's mobile client. It'd defer the task of maintaining the IRC…
2013
- 19CS
If you have developer documentation and want to boost your community with AI this is for you! Just pull in the base url of the site add some customization and get a sharable link for your chat, link it anywhere you want. I saw this trend in some places like gcp with Gemini, or Langchain or Supabase ask ai, but they're all custom-implemented solutions, not everyone wants to advocate developer resources to create the rag, deploy it and maintain it, you just want devs to build with your stuff, the more they can do the better, the quicker the better, and if they get a smooth experience while…
2024 · explainit.mzslabs.com
- 20CA
2021 · github.com
- 21IB
I've built VT Chat, a privacy-first AI chat application that keeps all your conversations local while providing advanced research capabilities and access to 15+ AI models including Claude 4 Sonnet and Claude 4 Opus, O3, Gemini 2.5 Pro and DeepSeek R1. Live: https://vtchat.io.vn | Source: https://github.com/vinhnx/vtchat The core difference is true local-first architecture. All chats are stored in IndexedDB with zero server storage. Your API keys never leave your browser, and I can't see them even as the developer. You can switch between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google…
2025
- 22CS
Today my friends and I are launching a project we've been hacking on for the past few years. It's friendly web based group chat (with apps for Mac, Windows, and iOS) that's not limited to a single business. It basically offers the power of XMPP with a simple UI. chatsimply.com Please check it out and let me know what you think!
2014
- 23CA
Just finished the first draft of my weekend project. Sadly my industry is far away from all the exciting machine learning developments happening right now, so I wrote this project as my first exploration into the world of LLMs. It's not perfect, but I'm excited to see where the project goes from here! https://github.com/clarkmcc/chitchat My main motivations were: - Easy-of-use: Many models are supported out-of-the-box so users don't have to figure out how to download, where to save, etc. - Intuitive: A clean interface - Cross platform: The project is written in Rust and…
2023 · clarkmccauley.com
- 24TT
Hi everyone, nice to meet you and I am a newcomer of HN. I have made a binary tool Aih that could communicate with Bard, ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama(HuggingChat) from the terminal. https://github.com/Databingo/aih Since CAPTCHA challenges and bots detecting have become increasingly difficult, I've changed my strategy from hacking the APIs to simulating a real browser's action. The tool first takes the logged-in cookies of Google, ChatGPT, Claude, and HuggingChat accounts from the real Chrome browser, then it opens an invisible instance of Chromium for communication, then…
2023 · github.com
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