Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Forth – Rethinking (and improving) News
Hi HN -- After a thread a couple of weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866242) got more attention than I expected, and someone even suggested doing a Show HN (thanks wanderingmind)-- so, here goes: We're building a network of local journalists, along with others in national verticals. Our incentive structure exists in a way to promote news people want to come back to read, not clickbait headlines, divisive or anger driving hot takes, or lowest common denominator coverage. All geared to 18-34 year olds, who are less likely to consume local news in the traditional…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Forth – Rethinking (and improving) News launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Hello HN, I was away from my computer for two weeks, and after coming back and reading the latest discussions on HN about coding assistants (models, harnesses), I felt very out of the loop. My normal process would have been to keep reading and figure out the latest and greatest from people's comments, but I wanted to try and automate this process. Basically the goal is to get a quick overview over which coding models are popular on HN. A next iteration could also scan for harnesses that people use, or info on self-hosting or hardware setups. I wrote a short intro on the page about the…
2024 · hnup.date · its alternatives →
- 2
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 →
- 3
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 →
- 4
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 →
- 5
This started as a reaction to a conversational trope. Despite being a tranquil place, even conversations at my yoga studio often start with, "Can you believe what's going on right now?" with that angry/scared undertone. I'm a news avoider, so I usually feel some smug self-satisfaction in those instances, but I wondered if there was a way to satisfy the urge to doomscroll without the anxiety. My hypothesis: Apply a 40-year latency buffer. You get the intellectual stimulation of "Big Events" without the fog of war, because you know the world didn't end. 40 years creates a mirror between…
Nov 2025 · forty.news · its alternatives →
- 6
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
2023 · zsync.xyz · its alternatives →
- 7FH
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 →
- 8IM
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 →
- 9
HN+▲92Launch your very own HackerNews clone & grow your community
2023 · hn.plus · its alternatives →
- 10
Today's internet is filled with dopamine wells of content. I wanted to steer away from that and foster meaningful writing. So I made a site where you can only have a single post. The intention is to encourage thoughtful posts like the blogs we all love here at HN (Paul Graham's, fasterthanlime, Bartosz Ciechanowski's, etc). For now posts are only markdown, but I intend to make some markdown extensions to make posts more dynamic.
2022 · app.pressnt.net · its alternatives →
- 11
- 12
Hey all, we're reposting from our previous Show HN about 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28644205 Since then we've grown to more than 5k users across nearly 1k groups and have sent out more than 100k update prompts. The premise is simple - social media stinks and you either don't see updates from people you care about (they never post) or you miss the updates (flooded by other people's updates or an algorithm that downplays an update you'd care about even if it's seemingly unimportant). And we're ramen profitable (more so now that we've migrated the majority…
May 2026 · togetherletters.com · its alternatives →
- 13SH
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 →
- 14
I forked pajecawav's better-hn repo, which turned out to be an excellent foundation to build on. While the original implementation was clean and functional, it didn't quite capture the essence of Hackernews. More importantly, it was missing some features I considered essential for a truly viable alternative. After tinkering with it for a while, I think I've nailed it—at least for my own use case. If it works well for me, chances are others might find it useful too. So I figured, why not share it? Pretty straightforward: no ads, no tracking, no monetization schemes and no intention to do so.…
2025 · hakkernieuws.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 15SP
Hey, HN -- I just received the following email and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously I want to discourage requested-posting like this; is there some structured way that we can do that? One of the things I love about HN is how high the signal-to-noise ratio is relative to...pretty much the rest of the internet. I wouldn't ordinarily call someone out like this, but I want to innoculate HN against this sort of thing. ---- Hey doches, Not sure if it's conventional, but thought I'd ask anyway. Would you be open to posting about my product on Hacker News? I understand that similar to…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 16HN
We're still in private beta but would love to give more invites and get feedback.
2011 · its alternatives →
- 17SM
Twitter is often my source of Hacker News, but I had a problem of getting just the news without HN comments, which many times are even better than news itself, so I came up with an idea to have news and comments under the same URL. I parse RSS feeds, put new items in database, get bit.ly short link and post all to Twitter. Links on twitter are like this http://xcode.x10.mx/?id=2411858 and to see HN comments all you need is to move mouse over the handle on the left side. What do you think? Like it, have any suggestions, ideas or anything else in mind feel free to speak up. I'm happily using…
2011 · xcode.x10.mx · its alternatives →
- 18UH
I've setup a bulletin board for the HN community that only accepts registrations from HN users. The idea behind it is to allow members of the community to have open discussions with each other that would otherwise be regarded as off topic. Any and all feedback welcome. http://hnbb.org
2012 · hnbb.org · its alternatives →
- 19IB
Think of HackerNews, but only for AI content. Did build this out of the wish for easier discoverability of new technologies in the AI/ML space. Obviously, so far only a tiny small community, but maybe a few of you find it nice to be around and want to post a link there every now and then :)
2023 · news.aiapipro.com · its alternatives →
- 20AP
Hi HN, I've been a daily user here for almost 15 years. Over that time, my interests have shifted. I find I'm now more interested in deep-dive technical posts and personal blogs than the big tech announcements that often dominate the front page. The "top" feed was starting to feel stale, and I was spending more time digging through "new". So, I decided to build what I wanted: a personalized "For You" feed. Link: https://hn.shaped.ai It's a simple concept: you log in with your normal HN credentials, and as you favorite stories, it learns what you're interested in and re-ranks the…
2025 · hn.shaped.ai · its alternatives →
- 21AN
Hi all, Made a little app, its at http://newsinamap.com This is my first project and HN was a source of inspiration I thought of sharing it here. Feedback would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.
2012 · newsinamap.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Show HN submissions peaked at 6.3x their ChatGPT-launch level, while the number of successful submissions remained relatively flat.
Aug 2026 · orangecrumbs.com · its alternatives →
- 23HL
I am re posting this because when I had made this post the first time there were a few problem with the site that I had to fix and had not anticipated. I got some nice feedback though, so I thought I'd just make one more post because most of the problems have been fixed. HN Live is an alternative interface to Hacker News which provides all of the data on Hacker News in real time. This allows for the real time viewing of what goes into and leaves the trending page as well as the `newest` section. It is just a personal project, and I would like some feedback if you have any. Thanks Site:…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 24T1
HN has some of the best discussions on the internet, but I don’t love reading 100 comments to find 10 great insights. This site analyzes top HN threads with LLMs and summarizes the key ideas, disagreements, and resources — while preserving links to the original discussion. Useful for revisiting old threads as well. Updated daily, manual-assisted for quality, no spam, fan project only. Would love thoughts from the community. https://hn-discussions.top
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
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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 →