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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Follow Hackers. Chrome extension to follow your favorite HN users

Download: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hapackcnjagkljgfjlgonohbabnfgopc Source: https://github.com/ImFatYoureFat/follow_hackers I built this extension this past weekend. It uses Javascript (obviously), python (Flask) and Redis. I would love to hear any comments or suggestions.Thanks.

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Follow Hackers. Chrome extension to follow your favorite HN users launched in 2012; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    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 · its alternatives →

  2. 2
  3. 3

    I've made a simple Chrome extension for Hacker News: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-favourite-users/hleiemhnepoghplnnhkhpnjeiaifnobo It allows you to add your favourite users to a list, and the extension will highlight them here on HN. Simple, but it prevents me from missing comments made by my friends :) The extension is also open source so feel free to fork it: https://github.com/janhancic/hn-favourite-users I'll appreciate any feedback you can give me. Cheers!

    2012 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4HT

    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 · gethackertools.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…

    2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Chrome extension that injects a button to return to HN

    2021 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    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 →

  8. 8HN

    Hello everyone! This is a browser extension that attempts to enhance Hacker News user experience, while your data is kept secure, and private (never leaves the browser). Browsers have evolved significantly since doing a v1 back in 2010, which was one of the contributing factors, for attempting a complete re-take few months ago. Personally, I was surprised how useful it turned out to be when browsing around HN. On the linked page you can find install link(s) from web-browser stores, and demo video/screenshots of the features[1] What do you think ? [1] including, browsing content with…

    2023 · carina.app · its alternatives →

  9. 9
  10. 10

    Hey HN, I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Hacker News design. I previously launched Modern for Wikipedia [1] here back in December, and it seemed like the obvious next choice to build one for HN too! So I've taken what I learned from building that, and have spent all my spare time this year building Modern for HN. I realize this won't be for everyone, but it was a fun project to work on, and I'm really happy with the result so far. Hope you like it too! Lots more planned for future updates, and suggestions welcome :) [1]…

    2022 · modernhn.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Web Extension: Easily find Hacker News discussions about the page you're currently browsing. - pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I have a dedicated HN tab that I come back to and reload multiple times a day to see whats new and hot. I wrote a Chrome Extension to: - quickly scan new articles since my last reload - quickly scan highly discussed articles - open actual articles and discussions in a new tab This links to the source code. The chrome extension is linked at the bottom of the github page. Note: - This extension only operates on the HN front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/news) - The first time you reload the HN front page after installing the extension all articles will get highlighted.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13HF

    HN Follow lets you follow authors on Hacker News, and get email notifications when they post. It was inspired by alerthn.com and hnreplies.com. The app was built in an experimental style on Val Town. We’re trying to create a new web primitive that you can: 1. write like a function 2. run like a script 3. fork like a repo 4. install like an app This is our 5th iteration of this same “HN Follow” app. We launched the 3rd version here on Hacker News six months ago[1], but it was very kindly removed from the front page by dang in favor of us launching Val Town itself first, which we did in…

    2023 · val.town · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi Hacker News, I developed an open source browser extension for summarizing Hacker News articles with OpenAI and Anthropic LLMs. It currently supports Chrome [1] and Firefox [2] (desktop). The extension adds the summarize buttons to the HN front page and article pages. It is bring-your-own-key, i.e. there's no back end behind it and the usage is free, you insert your API key and pay only for tokens to your LLM provider. [1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-tldr/oo... [2]…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    I built a Chrome extension that shows existing Hacker News posts for the current website. Background: Often when I read articles or websites, I find the associated HN posts and discussions at least as interesting as the content itself. I have been wishing for a solution to have all HN discussions for a page I am visiting directly to my fingertips, without searching. In fact, there are already extensions for it, but all of them (at the time of my search) were only developed with Manifest v2 and will therefore soon be deactivated. For this reason (and to get to know the development process of…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16MF
  17. 17

    I wrote a small Chrome extension that allows the user to replace all usernames on Hacker News with either the string `anonymous` or a deterministic hashed value.

    2023 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    2019 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    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 · its alternatives →

  20. 20AC

    Machine learning engineer. Five years at Uber. PhD in Management Science & Engineering, Stanford.

    2011 · mfairley.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21HS
  22. 22

    Hi All, since I am consistently overwhelmed with all the all the ai/gpt news on the hn front page I built this simple extension to filter out such articles and show them on the extension popup if I'm in the mood to read. I am interested in the topic but just tired of reading the similar discussions (local models, llama on mac, ai taking away our jobs, etc) all the time. Every few days I search for topics on hn.algolia.com and go over any exciting development. Ironically, since this was the first time I built an extension chat-gpt helped build 90% of the extension since . Also once…

    2023 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hacker News blocklist extension for Chrome. Contribute to morgante/hn_blocklist development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24FH

    Hey HN. I created this website. https://pj4533.com/hn-overlooked/ It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this. I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I…

    2025 · pj4533.com · its alternatives →

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