Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to HN Follow – email alerts from your friends on Hacker News
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…
HN Follow enables users to follow specific authors on Hacker News and receive email notifications when those authors post new stories or comments. Built as a collection of customizable JavaScript snippets rather than a… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. HN Follow – email alerts from your friends on Hacker News launched in 2022; 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 →
- 2HF
2014 · hn-follow.desh.es · its alternatives →
- 3MH
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 →
- 4

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 →
- 5FH
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 →
- 6

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 →
- 7HR
2016 · hnreplies.com · its alternatives →
- 8

Alerts, AI summaries, and easy search for Hacker News
2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 9AD
We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…
2024 · hn.trieve.ai · its alternatives →
- 10

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 →
- 11

(Unofficial) Login with HackerNews
2022 · loginwithhn.com · its alternatives →
- 12HT
2011 · hntrends.jerodsanto.net · its alternatives →
- 13

Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.
2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · its alternatives →
- 14HN
2015 · hnnotifications.com · its alternatives →
- 15

The Hacker News front page, with a short video explainer for every story.
26d ago · hn.watch · its alternatives →
- 16

Hi HN! I'm Jonathan and I built Hacker Search (https://hackersearch.net), a semantic search engine for Hacker News. Type a keyword or a description of what you're interested in, and you'll get top links from HN surfaced to you along with brief summaries. Unlike HN's otherwise very valuable search feature, Hacker Search doesn't require you to get your keywords exactly right. That's achieved by leveraging OpenAI's latest embedding models alongside more traditional indexes extracted from the scraped and cleaned up contents of the links. I think there are many more interesting things…
2024 · hackersearch.net · its alternatives →
- 17MB
2022 · handlr.sapico.me · its alternatives →
- 18HG
2018 · hnnotify.xyz · its alternatives →
- 19

- 20

I love HN but always felt the search with algolia is okay but does have some limitations. Since I work at Vectara I decided to try and create a better search for HN. It's based on data from roughly the last 6 months of HN stories and comments. Would love to hear feedback and how useful this is relative to the existing search.
2024 · hackernews.demo.vectara.com · its alternatives →
- 21HC
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 →
- 22FH
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 →
- 23HB
Get your public IP address instantly. Simple, fast, and reliable API for developers.
2021 · hnbadges.netlify.app · its alternatives →
- 24

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 →
Also compare
- HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN alternatives
- HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN alternatives
- Meet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city alternatives
- My recommendation engine for Hacker News alternatives
- Find Hidden Gems on HN alternatives
- I built an interactive HN Simulator 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 →