AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to HN v0.2.1 – Native macOS app for reading HN
Hey HN folks, Last week I released the first public version of 120 HN — a fully native Hacker News client for macOS. This week, I'm excited to share version 0.2.1 with some essential updates: The app now remembers window size, position, and sidebar state between sessions Improved AI summaries: more concise, relevant with link back to the comments, easier to read with short paragraph form. Minor tweaks to navigation and layout for a smoother experience Sneak peek: local LLM support is coming in the next release. As always, the app is free to use. Any suggestions or comments would be…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1

Hey HN! I built a native macOS desktop client for Hacker News and I'm open-sourcing it under the MIT license. GitHub: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News Download (signed & notarized DMG, macOS 14.0+): https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News/releases Screenshots: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News#screenshots I spend a lot of time reading HN — I wanted something that felt like a proper Mac app: a sidebar for browsing stories, an integrated reader for articles, and comment threading — all in one window.…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2

macOS HackerNews client that aims to be a Mac-assed Mac app. Written in Swift + AppKit. - goranmoomin/HackerNews
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3EM
Yesterday I decided I wanted to experiment with different ways of reading HN. After considering a few options, I settled on a Mac app and spent a couple of hours planning/sketching on paper. This morning I fired up Xcode and spent 4 hours hacking away and I must say I'm liking how it's looking. Since the project is in its very early stages, I though that it could be a very good time to get some feedback. I've posted a few screenshots at http://imgur.com/a/rCbVN and uploaded a binary at http://abra.rm-fr.net/~fiam/HackerNews.zip If you have some free time, give a try and let me know what you…
2011 · imgur.com · its alternatives →
- 4

Hey HN! I'm excited to share a tool I've been working on - a native Hacker News reader built with Rust and egui. Here's a screenshot: https://github.com/haojiang99/hacker_news_reader/blob/main/s.... As a daily HN reader, I've always struggled with keeping track of interesting posts I want to read later. Browser tabs pile up, bookmarks get forgotten, and I lose track of what I've already read. I needed a way to: 1. Browse HN efficiently (across all sections - hot, new, show, ask, jobs, best) 2. Quickly mark posts as "todo" for later reading 3. Mark posts as…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5

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 →
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- 8

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 →
- 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

Alerts, AI summaries, and easy search for Hacker News
2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 11

- 12ID
2013 · hackernewstab.com · its alternatives →
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TLDR: Build a quick HN profile to see how little context LLMs need to personalise your feed. Rate 30 posts once, get a permanent ranked homepage you can return to. Our goal was to build a tool that allowed us to test a range of "personal contexts" on a very focused everyday use case for us, reading HN! We are exploring use of personal context with LLMs, specifically what kind of data, how much, and with how much additional effort on the user’s part was needed to get decent results. The test tool was a bit of fun on its own so we re-skinned it and decided to post it here. First time posting…
2025 · hackernews.coffee · its alternatives →
- 14

Hacker News client for macOS. Contribute to mattrighetti/HNReaderApp development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15

Public datsets made with https://getomni.ai/. Contribute to getomni-ai/datasets development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16AH
2016 · florian.github.io · its alternatives →
- 17

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 →
- 18AM
There are many like it but this one is mine: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pivit/id705715915?mt=8 Seriously, though, this Hacker News reader is better than what's out there, or I wouldn't have spent time on it. How? Most importantly, it utilizes the background refresh APIs, so content is always up to date. Pull to refresh is there, but you probably won't need it. The more addicted you are, the more often it updates. So if you check every few hours, you'll always get the current front page. Complementing this, it helps you see not only what you've read but what…
2013 · its alternatives →
- 19AP
Hello! I’ve been reading Hacker News for years and have a bad habit of favoriting articles but never actually going back to read them. I finally built hnbuffer to scratch my own itch and help me work through that backlog. I also mainly built this as an excuse to learn/use some of the languages/frameworks/tools since I have another backlog of things I wanted to try too. It syncs your favorites into a queue with a reader mode and swipe gestures. The streak tracking is something I'm still experimenting with. Note: It requires an HN login to scrape the favorites list (credentials…
2013 · hnbuffer.com · its alternatives →
- 20

I thought building something that I would use while learning iOS SDK was a good idea so I built HN Browser. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hn-browser/id578535095?ls=1&mt=8 HN Browser is a simple app which lets you to read articles and comments on Hacker News. (no voting and writing comment yet) For the logo, I reached out to Joel Glovier(http://joelglovier.com) for his previous work on Hacker News logo(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4731140) and he kindly granted the use of his work. It was really fun experience to collaborate and build a mobile app using iOS SDK. (although…
2012 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 21

HN is all about the rich discussions. We wanted to take the HN experience one step further - to bring the familiar keyboard-first navigation, find interesting viewpoints in the threads and get a gist of long threads so that we can decide which rabbit holes to explore. So we built HN Companion a year ago, and have been refining it ever since. Try it: https://app.hncompanion.com or available as an extension for Firefox / Chrome: [0]. Most AI summarization strips the voices from conversations by flattening threads into a wall of text. This kills the joy of reading HN discussions.…
Feb 2026 · hncompanion.com · its alternatives →
- 22IM
Hi all, i made an iOS HN reader, so i can read HN nicely on my iphone while pushing my daughter on the swing (she likes going on the swing for a good hour on saturdays... go figure). Anyway i figured i'd open source it and show it here: http://splinter.com.au/hacker-news-reader https://github.com/chrishulbert/HackerNewsReader And its on the app store if you couldn't be bothered firing up xcode: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-reader/id457519010?ls=1&mt=8 Anyway, hopefully someone out there can learn something looking at the code. There seems to be a dearth of example code /…
2011 · splinter.com.au · its alternatives →
- 23

We at Emerge Tools (YC W21) recently released open source Hacker News apps for both iOS and Android. The apps use the latest SwiftUI and Compose frameworks and are entirely native. Our goal is to help dogfood our products, but more importantly our team just enjoys reading HN every day and wanted an app to hack on and call our own. :) We are still missing some features but should otherwise be pretty solid. And open to any contributions. iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-by-emerge/id674092... Android:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24IN
I noticed I was getting side tracked reading Hacker News, checking back, reading articles, comments, etc. It felt like my productivity was being hampered so I created a simple web app to receive the most popular stories in a daily email. http://dailyhn.com
2011 · dailyhn.com · 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 →