Alternatives
Products that do what HN comment previews with Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B does
I was inspired by the notification summaries on iOS 18 and really liked the idea of AI giving you a quick preview of the content before going to the content. I applied that to HN and built a Chrome extension that summarizes the sentiment and content of HN comments and previews it right next to the stories on the homepage. Makes it so much easier to decide whether I want to delve into the HN comments of a story. It gave me a chance to play with Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B which has been great. Super fast, super cheap, huge context and does a great john on basic tasks like summarizing comment threads.…
- 1HI
Hi HN, Sharing HN Insights, a webapp I built that highlights trending themes and summarizes discussion threads from the front page. This started earlier this week as a toy project to test out Gemini 3 Pro in aistudio. I found the POC useful, so I decided to productionize it. I've included the original seed prompt below: > Create an app that creates a summary of the comment threads for hacker news front page. The UX should be similar, but clicking the comments instead opens a summary. The summary is generated when clicked so it can gather new threads. To productionize, I used Claude Code and…
Nov 2025 · hn-insights.com
- 2
- 3HT
Fun little project, had Gemini 2.5 Pro summarize HN's top 30 each hour, both the stories and comment sections. Pretty impressed with Gemini 2.5. It's probably the first model other than Claude 3.7 Sonnet where I actually find the output readable. I normally use 3.7 Sonnet for coding, but used Gemini for the codegen on this one as well. Was pretty impressed! Using Cursor, it seemed to instruction-follow better than Claude generally does, and remain lucid during very long agent sessions. Thanks for your feedback!
2025 · tinysums.ai
- 4TA
I got fed up with the news reader apps out there so I decided to make my own. Its a simple concept where it tracks all your favorite news sources for new posts and the social shares it received. Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes. It's not meant to be alternative to HN, just a focused way to track your favorite sources. Please try it out and let me know what do you think, http://telescope.surf/ Note: you can do 'Add to Homescreen' on mobile to make it as an app. Please leave a feedback or any feature wishlist you may have. Thanks!
2017
- 5
- 6IM
Hey HN! Thank you for all the support and feedback on my original submission 2 months ago. I've been improving the backend using a MCTS/AlphaZero approach and it's currently producing much better results. My long term goal is to allow users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language. The cost of each project has been lowered to $9 as performance with smaller models has improved (I migrated from Claude-3-Opus to gemini-1.5-flash). Thanks for checking it out!
2024 · saas-quick.com
- 7
Chrome extension allow the user to communicate with the AI
Sep 2025
- 8CE
Hello! I built this to solve a personal problem of where I didn't want to wade down large chains of HackerNews comment threads in order to get the key takeaways from the discussions. I built this Chrome extension, which supports both OpenAI and Ollama(local LLMs) to summarize comments and display the summary within Chrome's sidepanel. It's open source as you can see from the link, feedback appreciated!
2024 · github.com
- 9SHShow HN▲14
Hi, i was wondering what the HN community thinks of this email tone check application? Do you think this can be done better with open-source? Disclaimer: I am neither a founder or an employee at the company. Just someone who had a similar idea.
2011 · tonecheck.com
- 10BE
We’re George and Ann, and want to share a Hacker News specific browser extension that we have been working on. We all love the rich discussions in HN, but navigating long posts with multiple threads can sometimes be challenging. You get lost in the depth and breadth of the discussion. There are a few AI-based summarization tools, but they typically focus on summarizing the article rather than the comments, and thus miss the essence of threaded discussions. So, we built Hacker News Companion, a browser extension that makes it easy to navigate discussions and understand diverse viewpoints…
2024 · github.com
- 11AB
Best to just try it :) The tl:dr is it helps you to r The summaries with references to parts of the page are useful now - and the "text zoom" tool a glimpse of where we can go Works with local Ollama and the usual suspects: Mistral/OpenAI/Gemini Obviously could be better - and hopefully will be :)
2024 · socontextual.com
- 12
- 13HS
Hey HN, We have made this free extension to help you skim HN articles at the speed of light! Give it a try and tell us your experience!
2023 · chrome.google.com
- 14DW
I wrote a simple web UX in Python/JavaScript that spawns a conversation with Google Gemini with MCP commands that let it work on a specific coding task that you specify: http://github.com/alefore/duende The UX lets you observe the conversation and provide guidance (e.g. "don't implement Foo through Bar, that's suboptimal; instead …"). It supports a `--review` mode, where once the main conversation says "I'm done with the task", various "evaluation" conversations are spawned, each focusing on reviewing the change from a very specific angle (e.g. "does it introduce…
2025 · github.com
- 15GV
Hey HN, I just updated my project that compares some LLMs. It uses your prompt for all the models and runs at the same time. You can see the results being generated in real-time and decide what's the best for your use case. I'm open to any suggestions and feedback. Thanks!
2024 · geminivsgpt.com
- 16RO
I was lucky enough to have my site trending on Friday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25872922). It’s an icon site that lists open source icons. I wanted to share some stats on the results after 3 days. Worth noting was that I submitted it on a Friday morning (at which point I went for a walk and a coffee; eek). - 24,997 page views. I (embarrassingly) didn’t have GA set up when I first submitted it, so this is probably missing a few hundred page views - 21 “feedback” emails (half of which were spam). I assume such a high percentage of these were spam because my Feedback…
2021
- 17LM
TL;DR paste an article URL in https://letmesummarizethatforyou.com/ and get a brief summary in a shareable link. Hey HN, Machine generated summaries have become pretty good, and I still often find myself staring at a long article I'm interested in but don't have enough time/energy at the moment to read it. Copy pasting to Gemini/ChatGPT and asking it to summarize works, but I sometimes find it a little tedious. I had a 6 hour flight and I used it to put together this simple web app, all it does is fetch the URL, extract the text (if it's an HTML/PDF), ask an LLM…
2024 · letmesummarizethatforyou.com
- 18WB
Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…
2024 · dorik.com
- 19L3
I recently custom prompted 1.5 pro to teach me new words by helping me to make sentences using them - the only way to learn vocab IMO. It's been helpful for my GRE prep, hope you may find it useful as well!
2024 · wordlab.cloud
- 20MH
Hello everyone!, this is a app I have being working on recently. I know there are number of HN readers on android. But couldn't find a one suitable for daily use. So I started developing this app. News articles, comments open in default browser of the device. Click on title of the item to open the article and anywhere else to open comments. Pull down to refresh. Swipe left and right to change the tabs. This is only the first phase of application. Lot of functions yet to be implement (you can read more in Google play listing). Before developing further I would love to have some feedback. BTW…
2015
- 21WT
I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about. I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?" So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of…
Jan 2026 · hnsignals.com
- 22VC
Hey folks at HN, I didn’t want to pay $10–$30/month for AI email tools, so my friend and I built a free Chrome extension that works directly inside Gmail. It has the core features you'd expect: - When you open a reply, it drafts a response based on the thread — just hit Tab and send. - As you type, it suggests completions based on context (like autocomplete, but smarter). - Press Shift+Tab to force a suggestion anytime. - You can also give it context with // comments — e.g. // suggest a time on Thursday afternoon — and press Tab to drop in the response. Then hit…
2025 · chromewebstore.google.com
- 23IA
Maybe you've had this experience too: You build something you're proud of, post it on HN with your low-karma account, and... crickets. Zero votes, zero comments. That's what happened to me last Monday. I posted my coding tool (XaresAICoder - an open-source browser IDE) that I'd built with AI assistance. In my mind it was revolutionary. On HN? Completely ignored. Then I wondered: How many other potentially great projects suffer the same fate? What "hidden gems" are we missing because they come from low-karma accounts? So I built hn-gems (with help from Claude and my own XaresAICoder). It…
2025 · hn-gems.sensem.de
- 24HC
hey HN, I am re launching an HN client app that i built this year. It got very little traction when i launched earlier. Following YC advice to do multiple launches, I am going to give it another shot. It’s fairly basic, but here are some of the features that I hope you would like. - Minimal, distraction-free UI - keyword based search functionality to see past stories. - Dark mode support - Breeze through comments with collapse functionality. - Bookmark your favourite stories to read later or revisit any time - All your reading history is saved. - Export reading history when you want it. I…
2025
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