Alternatives
Products that do what Commentate – Join a live discussion with your favourite philosophers does
I've always dreamed of listening in on conversations between legendary minds in art and philosophy. I created a couple "rooms" that allow us to join in on these conversations, even participate. Still very early, with so many interesting ideas I want to implement. I would also love for the foundation contexts for commentators to be "open-sourced." Link below for anyone curious about how the base narratives are referenced. https://github.com/cmteone/commentators
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2021 · pairagraph.com
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- 5HT
We all have an opinionated colleague, manager or even a relative. Discussing issues may get tricky and frustrating. In some cases this can end up in aggressive debates where nobody changes opinion. I came across a YouTube channel where a guy uses the Socratic method to discuss god believes with random people, in a few questions he gets people to lower their level confidence. On top of that his discussions are friendly, last only for 5 minutes and he is often greeted at the end of the conversation. This video shows off the Socratic method in action: *…
2017
- 6IM
This is our entry in the "spontaneous event creation" ring. I'd love to hear what HN readers think!
2011 · shoutfast.com
- 7IF
Hello there! I hope you're doing well today! I wanted to share something with you. Recently I was on the hunt for the best way to journal daily. Well, I had this idea - what if I could feed all my daily entries to an AI (ChatGPT), and create a friendly, supportive character like Socrates or Simon Sinek? This way, I could ask any questions about my life and mental health, and get some amazing advice on how to improve myself! The results have been absolutely mind-blowing ! I even made a short GIF to show you how it works - check it out! - https://gifyu.com/image/SdHLH I've…
2023
- 8RI
2015 · rationalfiction.io
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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
- 10SO
Hey HN, My co-founders and I have been working on a project for the last month or so, and we'd like to get your input on it. We wanted to hear your thoughts on what we're doing - so check out our landing page, and let us know what you think/understand. Does it sounds like something you guys would want to use? http://www.thesharedweb.com/alpha/intro We'll tell you guys more about exactly what we're doing as the conversation evolves, but we just wanted to see what the initial reaction is, and what you understand (i.e. are we describing it in a way that makes sense). Really excited to hear your…
2010 · thesharedweb.com
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For years I’ve wanted to start a podcast to interview curious and passionate makers in the depths of their creative pursuits. I would love any feedback, a rating, and if you know anyone would would make a great guest, please let me know!
Dec 2025 · happymaking.art
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I created Thoughtly because many of my hobbies and interests - things I spend a lot of my time learning and writing about - are not reflected in my resume or in any single online profile. Written discussions online are generally insulated within specific communities (Stack Overflow, Reddit, Blogs, etc.), making it difficult for users to retain their credibility as they cross platforms. So we set out to quantify written discussion online and display them in a centralized portfolio. By enabling people to quickly display the extent of their involvement in a field, we provide context for online…
2014
- 13CA
Hi HN! I'm Anand, and I’m launching CQ2 (https://cq2.co) – a tool for thoughtful and coherent discussions. Discussions using existing written communication tools often turn into a tangle of sub-discussions around quotes, making it hard to follow. There's no clear view of all the comments in a specific sub-discussion and how the sub-discussion is related to its parent, forcing constant scrolling and hopping between comments to gather context for a meaningful response. On top of all that, it's tough to tell if any key points were overlooked. Meetings are hit-or-miss. When it comes to…
2024 · cq2.co
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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
- 15WT
I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about. I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?" So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of…
Jan 2026 · hnsignals.com
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I wanted to share & get advice on a web app I've been building - goTypecast.com allows people to be interviewed by groups of people. I think it could be useful for experts who want to answer questions on their specialist topic. An interesting use case might be a lecturer that wants to answer questions from their students on the topic of their last lecture. I could also see this being useful for bloggers that want to answer questions from their readers on their specialist subject. I'd really, really appreciate any feedback & advice.
2011
- 17AP
Hi HN! Me and my buddy made this in a weekend as an experiment in 1. building something quickly and putting it out there and 2. using AI in an interesting way; in this case a poetry judge. Our “judge” isn’t perfect, but the hope is that at least it’s a relatively fair system that everyone can be sure evaluates their work. Anyway, we wanted to see what the lovely people of HN think of it. Some background on the idea; I like poetry and thought it would be cool if there was a big competition with a large financial incentive that scales with the number of participants. Using AI as a judge allows…
2023 · acontestofwords.com
- 18LI
Hi HN! I kept hearing about Lisp and why it was special but didn't have a great place to start. I wanted something self-contained that helped me develop intuition rather than fluency. My hope is this is helpful for casual programmers, professionals from other fields who interact with code, or engineers who haven't had much exposure to interpreters or compilers. Hope this helps anyone else who's curious about getting a sense of Lisp and what makes it special with a limited time investment! Feedback or other cool Lisp things welcome :)
2022 · github.com
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Check out http://swrm.io Basically, we created a feedback platform, and launched it as a tool to allow designers to crowdsource feedback from other designers. The idea is that this tool would allow designers to improve, share knowledge, learn new skills, and consistently deliver their best work. There's a lot that still needs to get done, including making money, letting posts die out after a certain time, and making the site faster by generating image thumbnails. Any feedback would be appreciated and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Feel free to sign up. Thanks!
2012
- 20PI
2012 · pivory.com
- 21SR
I am probably out of my depth here. But please please point me in the right direction! I'd love to understand deeper. Thank you
2025 · essays.georgestrakhov.com
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It it always bugged me when I read or share an article, the discussion lives separately from the article. I imagined being able to add Google-Docs or Notion style comments on any website. We save a snapshot of the website and allow adding discussions that live side-by-side and directly reference parts of the article. HN articles are automatically indexed in https://cooo.link/hackernews and you can add any website, PDFs on https://cooo.link/ Built with SvelteKit, SingleFile(for archiving page), Railway. Solo dev. Would love feedback if you found it interesting!…
Mar 2026 · cool-link-web-production.up.railway.app
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The first ever AI peer reviewed research article just got approved. It’s kinda crazy how advanced AI have come to replace researchers. I've just been using Deep Research on ChatGPT and Perplexity a lot to write and research complex technical reports for my boss. He loves the reports and it has decreased my workload a ton but I still have some frustrations with it. None of them provide an API that gets me the same quality of output you would with the applications. I wanted something with more control on the LLMs, swappable with the reasoning new models that came out. Not just prompt →…
2025 · github.com
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