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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

HF

24 alternatives to HN Firehose

Pulling the latest comments and submissions from the HN API every 30 seconds.

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. HN Firehose launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Hi HN, I hacked a simple service for gathering HN replies and organizing them by the parent's username. The main idea is to be able to efficiently get the latest replies to an HN user. For example, you can use this service to send yourself notifications when some replies to you on HN. The service queries the official HN API and can be self-hosted. It is basically ~30 lines of Bash script. I made this mostly for educational purposes -- thought you might find it useful for something. Cheers! Edit: for example, here are the latest replies to me [0]. It includes only recent replies, since I…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2HR
  3. 3

    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 →

  4. 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. 5

    I scraped every Show HN from the last 12 months (41,301 posts) plus the full comment tree of every launch with 10+ comments, ~100k comment timestamps, all from the Algolia HN API. The median launch gets 2 points and 0 comments. For launches that do get traction, half the comments they'll ever get arrive within 7.2 hours and 90% within 26, and the top decile decays on the same clock as everyone else. Vote timestamps aren't public, so comment timing is the attention proxy; caveats are in the post. Everything reproduces from the repo with one command…

    Jul 2026 · jonno.nz · its alternatives →

  6. 6WI
  7. 7

    Hey HN We loaded a BigQuery dataset of all of Hacker News, every comment, story and user, into camelAI. You can ask questions like: • “When does dang tend to comment during the day?” • “Which domains have gained the most submissions since 2015, year-over-year?” • “How has average comment length changed each January since 2007?” • “Top five users who link to arXiv papers the most.” It's behind a log-in to prevent abuse but free to use for 10 messages. No payment info required. We use OpenAI o3 or Claude sonnet 3.7 for the agent which can be really expensive. Would love feedback especially…

    2025 · app.camelai.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8EH
  9. 9HN

    Daily original takes and guides.

    2011 · hnnotify.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Contribute to archivy/archivy-hn development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Highlight new Hacker News comments, and other UX tweaks

    2019 · its alternatives →

  12. 12HG
  13. 13
  14. 14LF
  15. 15HN
  16. 16
  17. 17

    The latest Ask HN: What are you working[1] on thread just dropped. And to give my own answer, building structured datasets! I wrote a quick scraper for the HN comments. Just pulling every top level comment along with its replies as a nested object. This ended up pulling 642 top level comments with about 458 replies. I created a posrgres db with this original data set. The replies I just concatenated together in the order they came in (with an indent field to mark what level comment it was. Then stringified the json array and added it to the db. I generated the structured data using my own…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18T1

    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 →

  19. 19

    HN Notifier is a chrome extension that shows the number of unread comments to your HackerNews thread. One of the issues with HackerNews is that it is difficult to know when someone has replied to your post or comment, thus by missing an opportunity to continue the conversation. - meanands/hn-notifie

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20HR

    HNping lets you set a reminder for a HN post. You get a web push browser notification when it's time, and clicking it takes you back to the post. That's it. I built HNping because I kept stumbling on HN posts where the discussion still had to get going. Wanted to revisit, but didn't want to create even more bookmarks/etc I'll just forget about. So I created a 'remind me later' tool (like the reddit bot) to fix this for myself. To use it: go to hnping.com, enable notifications, and drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. Then click it on any HN post to set a reminder (5 minutes to 1…

    2025 · hnping.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21HF

    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 →

  22. 22HC

    2017 · hn-level-based-view.gomix.me · its alternatives →

  23. 23
  24. 24

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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 →