Alternatives
Products that do what Cryptick – free and open-source alternative to Minute Cryptic does
Hi HN! I'm an amateur cryptic crossword solver and setter, who cut my teeth on Minute Cryptic. I liked that you could create custom clues on MC but was annoyed that it required creating an account to do. I wanted to create a free, open-source, and (as much as possible) anonymous version to make it easy to share clues online; not everything needs a user account to provide a good service to users. I'm primarily a backend developer so this was also a learning experience in creating a site with no backend; it's all vanilla client-side HTML / CSS / JS, built using Metalsmith.js, hosted…
- 1HF
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
- 2AC
Hi HN!, We're a group of High Schooler's who have made a website for an international cryptic hunt we have been organizing. Everything has been built from the ground up and has been open sourced. We'd love feedback on our work. And if it interests you, feel free to register and try a level or two! URL: https://halocrypt.com/ Source: https://github.com/halocrypt We're particularly proud of our frontend, since we have used a framework we built ourselves!
2021
- 3
- 4SL
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
2011
- 5FF
A little while ago I built an automated website that finds free stuff while filtering out scams. It works in an interesting way. Most freebie sites on the web contain a mix of real, useful free stuff and scammy affiliate and pyramid schemes. I realized that affiliate links are always unique (because they need to contain an affiliate code) while real freebies have URLs that co-occur across multiple sites at roughly the same time. I wrote a crawler in Perl and MySQL that looks for repeating, off-domain URLs that temporally cluster on multiple free stuff sites. I was surprised and pleased to…
2011
- 6PF
My first python app, it displays posts from hacker news that is tagged under "Show HN"...
2013 · showhnapp.herokuapp.com
- 7AM
First, I'm by no mean a programmer. Second, I am reading HN for years, just registered to make this public and see if it can be useful for someone. I have nothing to gain monetary. A while ago, I decided that no blogging system was simple enough and I looked for a small wiki to use as a CMS/blog. Found WikWiki on C2.com and I mixed it with some basic Markdown syntax, a minimal template and added password protection. The result is a single php file, no database and no dependencies. Code is a mess, not modulable, probably wrong in so many ways, but it can probably used by some as personal…
2022 · mindwi.se
- 8HN
I put this together since I find myself switching away from the terminal to see if anything new popped up in HN. There might be similar ones out there, didn't bother looking. It was a quick experiment, which might end up with a few more features.
2011 · github.com
- 9IB
Hi HN! My name is Yossi, and I'm a solo indie maker. SEO tools are super pricey and free tools often fall short, leaving most users to costly subscription-based tools. So, I built SEO Stuff, a keyword tool that uses a credit-based system for builders like me who use SEO more sporadically. Have a great day!
2024 · seo-stuff.com
- 10PO
Hey HN, A bit of backstory: I was job hunting for months, applying everywhere and racking up a ton of rejections. It got frustrating, so I decided to flip the script and build something useful instead: an open-source take on Cluely, that popular stealth AI tool from the $15M company. I figured why not recreate something that's already out there and buzzing, but make it free, transparent, and way better for privacy. Plus, it felt like a fun challenge. This is actually my first project ever using Tauri, and I'm hooked. I started out trying Electron, but it just wasn't cutting it for something…
2025 · github.com
- 11CP
Hi hackers, long time reader, first time "real" submitter. This is by no means a revolutionary idea, or even execution, but rather something I've always wanted to do, just to see if I could write a good implementation of it. So without further adieu: http://ca.pitali.st/ Yes, it's just an URL shortener. Please check out the API and if there anything you like about it, please share, so I can take this feedback with me to my future projects. If there's something you REALLY hate, that's feedback too. Don't be afraid to hurt my feelings; this was put together in less than 4 hours to see if I…
2011
- 12FA
Hey Friends, I always considered doing a show HN about this but never took the jump but since we're in the Show HN carnival I decided to share it. I wrote a free and open source quick guide to teach Firefox OS application development. With this ebook you go from zero to a little application in the Firefox Marketplace. https://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment/ I created this to give away at hackathons and hack days because the Mozilla docs were spread all over the developer hub, mdn and the wiki so it was hard for new developers to find what they needed. The…
2014
- 13E
Hello everyone, A couple of months ago I was introduced to Excalidraw and fell in love with it instantly. The only thing I didn't like was that I couldn't easily save my whiteboards and had to put everything in one whiteboard which started to lag my PC after a while. So I made ExcaliHub. It's exactly as it sounds: a hub for Excalidraw. It's free, open source, and I aim to keep it that way. Thanks in advance for any feedback!
2024 · excalihub.dev
- 14HD
For ClojureCup this year, we have built an online dictionary for programmers where people share information (subjective or objective) in dictionary format. Our aim is to build an online dictionary where people can share information about the programming world. Since the judging period is in progress, we cannot make any modifications yet, but will start making it better by introducing much needed features like editing/deleting once the ban is lifted. Enjoy and vote for us at http://clojurecup.com
2015
- 15AS
Hello Hacker News! In the past few weeks I've been working on a side project that allows you to post anonymously a short message and a photo that is tied to your location. Other people can see posts around them in a radius of 1 kilometer. Posts are ephemeral and disappear after one day. That's all. It started as an exercise to try to write a geohash index and to try nodejs and Redis. I'm not sure if/how it could be useful. Maybe it could be used as a quick way of sharing something with someone next to you, or to leave a reminder for someone at a specific location. Or it could be abused…
2015
- 16IM
Hi HN! In the last couple of weeks I've been working on Cranki: Cranki = Crosswords + Anki. (It's a stupid name tbh, haha) I like doing crosswords in Spanish (to learn vocab) but none of the apps out there allowed me to use my own list of words that I come across. So I built one instead. It's entirely client-side. No server, no database, no accounts, etc. Your words and stats are stored in local storage. I built this for myself but let me know if you like it!
Apr 2026 · cranki.app
- 17HN
I love books! I had once come across a great list of book recommendations on the LessWrong website ("The Best Textbooks on Every Subject"). But when I had stumbled upon the list a couple of years ago the last comments and recommendations on it were from 2011. And similarly I found that most recommendations on the web suffer from this form of time decay. What I wanted was a site that had high quality recommendations similar to the LessWrong list that would feel fresh and current. Amazon was overwhelming for me since it has a gazillion books on each subject and the "Thanks! Arrived in good…
2015
- 18ZU
Hi! I made this as a hackathon project, the result is really cool and works very well. All you need to do is connect with your Metamask wallet and start creating documents. It also has proof of autorship, so we know if you wrote the document, or you just copy/pasted from chatgpt. This could be useful for schools or something. Let me know what you think. Thanks!
2024 · zkpaper.com
- 19MF
Hi! Long time reader, first time submitter. I've finallllyy got my first webapp online. It's been a long time coming, I started it over a year ago and just been an hour here, a couple of hours here, and a period of a couple of months of nothing. I first wrote it as a way to learn some python it sort of grew to fill a need I had. It's at a point now where I'd LOVE some feedback as I am going round in circules. Please, it's free, just hit the home page, plugin in a name/email and url you want to links checked on. If you use the name 'DeleteMe' I will remove the account after a week, so feel…
2012
- 20AAnswerHN▲6
I had an itch to build a weekend project, and I've noticed that a lot of Ask HNs often go unanswered, so I built AnswerHN as a simple way to see recently asked, but as yet unanswered, questions on Hacker News.
2025 · answerhn.com
- 21HA
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
- 22CCCodr.cc▲8
I finished building Codr.cc last night. Codr is a code snippets sharing website much like pastie or snipt.org, but with a few innovations. First is that it autodetects the language and highlights it accordingly. The second, killer feature, is that it allows you to create snippets from files on your computer. You can select a file using the file browser, or you can drag and drop it into the site. The app will read its contents and create a snippet from it - ready to share. -- Now, I'm a college student in need of some quick cash. Recently I sold wrttn.in rather quickly thanks to HN, and I…
2011
- 23HT
Link: http://www.gethackertools.com Hey guys, I love Hacker News like all of you do, I spend a good portion of my time reading interesting content and the best, your replies... My only gripe is extra functionality that I know PG doesn't want to have to deal with... So I came up with this idea to make a super extension that does all the things I want, plus merges all the other cool HN extensions into one... Only problem? I don't have much time to put into it, so I figured why not open source it, and allow anybody in the community to fork it, improve it, add functionality, whatever they want,…
2012
- 24GA
hi hn, today I'm open sourcing a new SQL-like query language that's built for the web. it has dedicated syntax for request, parsers, selectors, and javascript snippets... it was built on nodejs with the incredible moo lexer and nearley parser. if you're a fan of regular expressions, do I have some code to show you! the website is mostly just a few examples and a playground where you can write & run (& share!) your own queries. there's also an introductory blog post where i try but ultimately fail to justify why this should be its own language and not a library/framework. enjoy!
2024 · getlang.dev
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