Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to FollowDev, HH-like forum exclusively for software dev-related topics
I'm not interested in politics or business, yet I somehow end up wasting time reading them here. That's why I've decided to create a Hacker News-like forum exclusively for software development-related topics. I find ranking to be unnecessary since i don't see more than 50-100 posts a day. I will add a comments feature once there are enough users. I hope FollowDev helps you discover new & unique content
FollowDev is a forum dedicated exclusively to software development topics, modeled after Hacker News but without ranking systems. It serves developers seeking focused technical content without off-topic discussions… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. FollowDev, HH-like forum exclusively for software dev-related topics launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1HF
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 →
- 2
A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!
2010 · slideshare.net · its alternatives →
- 3
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 →
- 4
- 5
Grow your blog as a developer without an existing audience
2020 · bloggingfordevs.com · its alternatives →
- 6
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 →
- 7IM
I noticed the who's hiring threads are very popular every month, so I decided to create a job board specifically for hacker news. You can tag jobs, search, view user's profiles and more. Tell me what you guys thing! Any feedback is appreciated.
2013 · hnjobs.org · its alternatives →
- 8
- 9FH
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 →
- 10SH
This morning I've submitted our project to HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099054 Got pretty helpful feedback. But that wasn't the only thing. 478 people requested invite out of 755. 63% conversion rate. Almost 9K unique visitor visited our website. At some point in the morning I was seeing 400+ active users on the website. Unbelievable. 35 people registered without telling them how to register. ( You cannot register directly, there is only a login form - but they figured out a way :) http://imgur.com/Kbf9J 6K people visited directly from Hacker News, 1K from Twitter ( I guess…
2012 · its alternatives →
- 11HN
I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
2024 · hn.moritz.pm · its alternatives →
- 12
Public datsets made with https://getomni.ai/. Contribute to getomni-ai/datasets development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13FH
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 →
- 14
- 15WA
Hey HN, I'm sure you've seen the monthly "Ask HN: What Are You Working On?" headlines on [Hacker News](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Honestly, it's my favorite topic because it's packed with insights about what other hackers are up to. I wondered what it would be like if instead of just a headline, there was a whole website where hackers could post daily updates, and where we could follow the hackers we're interested in for their latest updates. And so, this web site was born. I hope it gets used frequently so we can all benefit from it…
2024 · hackerupdates.com · its alternatives →
- 16
GitRanks▲127Hi HN, I built GitRanks because I’ve always wanted a clear, fun way to see how my open-source work compares - both globally and right here at home. The app pulls in GitHub data to give every developer an at-a-glance “scorecard”, then rolls those into live leaderboards so you can: - Track rankings by stars, contributions and followers - Filter worldwide vs. your own country - Refresh daily - no waiting weeks to see your progress - Discover rising devs you’ve never heard of and follow their work Tech Stack: - Back: MongoDB | NestJS | BullMQ | GraphQL - Front: Next.js | Tailwind | Shadcn Data:…
2025 · gitranks.com · its alternatives →
- 17
http://www.hnshowcase.com Moses (nnythm) and I browse Hacker News daily. Show HN posts are some of our favorite parts of HN. We wanted to create a way to browse Show HN articles, even those that might not quite make it to the front page. We created http://www.hnshowcase.com last weekend to make discovering projects posted on HN easier. It searches all "Show HN" posts and generates a thumbnail view for each of them. You can sort by submission date, points, and number of comments, and navigate with left/right or j/k keys. We used the following technologies: HN Search API, Pyramid web…
2011 · hnshowcase.com · its alternatives →
- 18
How to help more people discover software development
2015 · changelog.com · its alternatives →
- 19HF
2014 · hn-follow.desh.es · its alternatives →
- 20
- 21SH
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 →
- 22FI
2020 · showhn-dashboard.netlify.app · its alternatives →
- 23HF
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. Instead of being a normal app where we store all your data, it is just a wrapper over a series of JavaScript snippets that we guide you through installing, and which you can then customize 100%. The scripts call out to Agolia’s wonderful HN Search API. You can read more about the app’s architecture and it’s motivation here[1]. HN Follow runs on Val Town [2], an online scripting tool my team and I are…
2022 · hnfollow.com · its alternatives →
- 24
HyperDev, the fastest way to bang out code and run it online
2016 · stackoverflow.blog · its alternatives →
Also compare
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →