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Work · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Chat Mode for Hacker News (Live Comments Updater)

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…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Chat Mode for Hacker News (Live Comments Updater) launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 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. 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. 3

    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 →

  4. 4HR
  5. 5

    My personal itch to scratch just recently has been the umpteen formatting foibles of HackerNews. So, in the spirit of making the web more personal again, I knocked up a TamperMonkey userscript to fix up the worst of my personal bugbears. This isn't an attempt at a complete rebrand/redesign of the site, instead it's just fixing up what I think are the biggest design/readability issues whilst trying to remain true to the site's existing aesthetic. Key features: * Base font size increased * A little more room around headings * Top menu bar is full-width and with a little more padding…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6EH
  7. 7FH

    Hi HN! I’ve been lurking for a while, but out of fear of being steamrolled by HN readers or maybe just natural introversion, I’ve always been too scared to post or comment. Which is why 1. this is my first real Hacker News submission 2. my friend Michael and I built "Fake" Hacker News, a place to post and see what AI-generated HN comments might say. Here’s a video of me using fakeHN to test this very submission: https://www.loom.com/share/4b9f4f9d7c77489a86baeb92ec55a1ed?... And an example of one of our generated posts:…

    2023 · fakehn.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8HC
  9. 9

    Generate a ChatGPT for your website In 1 minute

    2023 · arsturn.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Add a bell emoji to unread comments on HackerNews. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

    2021 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    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 →

  12. 12SH

    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 →

  13. 13
    Arsturn▲82

    Create a ChatGPT for your website in 1 minute

    2023 · arsturn.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    2 months ago I launched a service that sends email alerts when you get a new comment/reply on Hacker News. I've only been able to acquire 6 users since releasing it (°ー°〃) I tried promoting it here (duuh), Reddit, and LinkedIn. Optimized it for SEO (ranking 3rd on my target keywords). All with limited success. So I've decided to open-source it! Links to... - frontend: https://github.com/mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-fronten... - backend: https://github.com/mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-backend I'm still using it for myself, since there's…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    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 · its alternatives →

  16. 16HN

    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 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    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 →

  18. 18

    Hi again Hacker News! OpenAI recently launched "Function Calling", which is a way for developers to describe functions to GPT-3.5/4 and have the model intelligently choose to output a JSON object containing arguments to call those functions. I decided to tinker around with it this weekend and build an MVP that uses OpenAI Functions + Vercel AI SDK to "chat" with the Hacker News API using natural language, in real time! It's fairly basic for now (supported functions: https://github.com/steven-tey/chathn/blob/main/app/api/chat/...) but…

    2023 · chathn.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  19. 19HL

    I am re posting this because when I had made this post the first time there were a few problem with the site that I had to fix and had not anticipated. I got some nice feedback though, so I thought I'd just make one more post because most of the problems have been fixed. HN Live is an alternative interface to Hacker News which provides all of the data on Hacker News in real time. This allows for the real time viewing of what goes into and leaves the trending page as well as the `newest` section. It is just a personal project, and I would like some feedback if you have any. Thanks Site:…

    2015 · its alternatives →

  20. 20SO
  21. 21QH

    2023 · hn.ossinsight.io · its alternatives →

  22. 22HN
  23. 23

    Just a personal experiment to build my first custom version of ChatGPT :) I'm spending too much time on this site, so it might ocasionally save me some scrolling and reading. Far from perfect and I'll continue to finetune it. I might even feed it with some classification data for each post, such as: Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38167604 Categories: ["Health, Tech Gadgets, AI"] Comment Perspectives: - 3 Medical Innovation Appreciation - 1 Technical Analysis - 1 Limitations Acknowledgment Edit: Looks like OpenAI is having outages today and custom GPTs are only…

    2023 · chat.openai.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Show HN submissions peaked at 6.3x their ChatGPT-launch level, while the number of successful submissions remained relatively flat.

    Aug 2026 · orangecrumbs.com · its alternatives →

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