Alternatives
Products that do what chop.ax – strip sites down to just their content does
I built web tool for accessing just the (usually text) content of sites. It handles news sites best, thanks to Mozilla's fantastic Readability library. It also supports sites that use client-side rendering, using Puppeteer. Stripped pages are cached in Redis. My main use-case for this tool is for extreme bandwidth-constrained networks, eg Meshtastic (with an internet gateway).
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My partner usually writes substack posts which I then mirror to our website’s blog section. To automate this, I made a simple tool to scrape the post and clean it so that I can drop it to our blog easily. This might be useful to others as well. Oh and ofcourse you can instruct GPT to make any final edits :D
2024 · markdowndown.vercel.app
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I’ve spent a lot of time reading articles that promise a lot but never give me what I’m looking for. They’re full of clickbait titles, scary claims, and pointless filler. It’s frustrating, and it’s a waste of my time. So I made a tool. You give it a URL, and it tries to cut through all that noise. It gives you a shorter version of the content without all the nonsense. I built this because I’m tired of falling for the same tricks. I just want the facts, not a bunch of filler. What do you think? I’m also thinking of making a Chrome extension that does something similar—like a reader mode, but…
2024 · cut-the-crab.streamlit.app
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2019 · github.com
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Defuddle is an open-source JS library I built to parse and extract the main content and metadata from web pages. It can also return the content as Markdown. I built Defuddle while working on Obsidian Web Clipper[1] (also MIT-licensed) because Mozilla's Readability[2] appears to be mostly abandoned, and didn't work well for many sites. It's still very much a work in progress, but I thought I'd share it today, in light of the announcement that Mozilla is shutting down Pocket. This library could be helpful to anyone building a read-it-later app. Defuddle is also available as a CLI:…
2025 · github.com
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2018 · getpolarized.io
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Hey HN! I originally built “html-to-markdown” back in 2018 (while still in high school) to handle complex HTML conversions where other libraries struggled. Now, I’ve released v2 — a complete rewrite designed to handle even more edge cases. It supports entire websites with a high accuracy. Example use: I’ve used it in my RSS reader to strip HTML down to clean Markdown, similar to the "Reader Mode" in your Browser. It can be used as a Golang package or as an CLI. Give it a try & tell me what edge cases you encounter!
2024 · github.com
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Hey all, Last time when we were on HackerNews [1], we received a lot of feedback, and we incorporated most of it. - We have changed our name from grep.help to usegrasp.com - A privacy policy page - Bulk import - Pricing page We are happy to introduce a new feature: a personalized answer search engine that provides direct citations to the content on the page. Demo: https://usegrasp.com/search?q=is+starship+fully+reusable%3F 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35510949
2023 · usegrasp.com
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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
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I've been working on and off on a Chrome Extension for Hacker News, the extension focusses on improved usability rather than design. I can almost guarantee that after a day you won't want to go back to regular Hacker News. Give it a try, features include: - Improved readability - Quick inline replies from comments page - Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames - Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user - Endless scrolling - Collapsible comment threads - Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer Forks, improvements and comments…
2012 · chrome.google.com
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2014 · github.com
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Sharing an internal tool that accelerated my development work 10-fold, especially with API debugging. Thought fellow developers here might find it useful. As a developer, I often have trouble reproducing errors at the client end. https://intercept.rest lets me debug and monitor API requests and responses. It is similar to the Network tab in Chrome Developer Tools but works for any API: mobile apps, webhooks, frontend etc. After I shared it with a close circle of friends, they found it incredibly useful and even found new use cases, I never imagined. Been a long time lurker here and…
2018
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Hi! I'm Marcell, and I'm working on FetchFox (https://fetchfoxai.com). It's a Chrome extension that lets you use AI to scrape any website for any data. I'd love to get your feedback. Here's a quick demo showing how you can use it to scrape leads from an auto dealer directory. What's cool is that it scrapes non-uniform pages, which is quite hard to do with "traditional" scrapers: https://youtu.be/wPbyPSFsqzA A little background: I've written lots and lots of scrapers over the last 10+ years. They're fun to write when they work, but the internet has changed in ways…
2024 · fetchfoxai.com
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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
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2014 · github.com
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