Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance
Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read). Main website: https://hackersmacker.org Chrome/Edge extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg... Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725 Firefox extension:…
Hacker Smacker is a browser extension for Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox that adds friend and foe marking to Hacker News commenters. Users click colored orbs next to commenter names to tag them as friends or foes… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1MH
Hey HN! I just published https://meet.hn, a map to find hackers in your city. How it works? Demo of the signup process: https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329 1. Fill the form: username, city+country 2. Copy the text generated in the box below the form, and paste it in your HN description. 3. Click "Add me on the map" Optionnaly (it's recommended!) you can add links to your socials as well as some tags to showcase your interests. Why does it exist? I created this because, despite its harsh reputation on the internet, I love the HN community. I…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 2
Highlight and tag your friends on Hacker News. Contribute to veggiedefender/hn-friends development by creating an account on GitHub.
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3HA
Hey there HN! I wanted to share a pet project of mine. I built HackYourNews [1] to scratch a personal itch: Knowing which stories to focus on while browsing aimlessly (though there is a certain joy in that, as well!) HackYourNews uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to summarize the destination article as well as the comments section. Summarization of the article is always cached, while summaries of the comments are regenerated if the comments count is >10% (or >10 comments) different. While I styled the homepage to welcome HNers, my preferred view is the Mobile view, accessed from the navbar. This…
2023 · hackyournews.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Web Extension: Easily find Hacker News discussions about the page you're currently browsing. - pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
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 →
- 6
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 →
- 7HN
The use of the em dash (—) now raises suspicions that a text might have been AI-generated. Inspired by a suggestion from dang [1], I created a leaderboard of HN users according to how many of their posts before November 30, 2022—that is, before the release of ChatGPT—contained em dashes. Dang himself comes in number 2—by a very slim margin. Credit to Claude Code for showing me how to search the HN database through Google BigQuery and for writing the HTML for the leaderboard. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933
2025 · gally.net · its alternatives →
- 8
2021 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Highlight new comments, mute users & tweak UI on Hacker News
2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 10HC
There's been lots of discussion recently about finding other HNers to talk to / bounce ideas off / work with, some Google spreadsheets were set up to share details but they were soon vandalised. I had a spare afternoon yesterday (which turned into a long day) and here's the result: http://www.hackernewsers.com/ It's only open to people with HN accounts, it lets you post your biography, location, skills etc. Anyway, I hope you like it and find it useful.
2010 · hackernewsers.com · 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
The Hacker News front page, with a short video explainer for every story.
25d ago · hn.watch · its alternatives →
- 13
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 →
- 14FH
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 →
- 15
Hacker News comments sidebar bookmarklet. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
2023 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
- 17AA
For example, paste this into Slack or Discord or whatever: https://news.ycombinator1.com/item?id=30179549 It works with comments, too: https://news.ycombinator1.com/item?id=30180253 Hastily-developed source: https://github.com/statico/ycombinator1.com
2022 · its alternatives →
- 18
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 →
- 19EH
2016 · comments.network · its alternatives →
- 20HR
2016 · hnreplies.com · its alternatives →
- 21HN
2012 · hncomments.nathancahill.com · its alternatives →
- 22AT
Hi everyone, we developed a tool that can easily tell you the overall sentiment of a message based on a word. For now it’s hacker news only but we think this thing has potential. Whether you’re a startup, solopreneur or product manager, you can track trends with it. We are also planning to add predictive tools and real time analysis. Operationally this tool is a lot cheaper than Sprout Social or other similar solutions on the market. No sign-up required. Just type and see results. I'd love your feedback on the tool's usefulness and any ideas for improvement.
2024 · classysoftware.io · its alternatives →
- 23FH
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 →
- 24
A database of top ranking Hacker News front page posts
2020 · harishgarg.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Meet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city alternatives
- Extension to highlight and tag users on Hacker News alternatives
- HackYourNews – AI summaries of the top HN stories alternatives
- Find HN threads about the page you're browsing alternatives
- I built an interactive HN Simulator alternatives
- I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript alternatives
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 →