Alternatives
Products that do what HN Watercooler – listen to HN threads as an audio conversation does
Hi HN, here's something fun to play with. It takes any HN thread and turns it into an audio conversation so you can listen to the thread while doing other things. I've seen many previous attempts to turn HN threads into podcasts, but they all shared a common issue IMO: trying to reduce the very rich back-and-forth into a single-thread single-reader boring podcast. Instead, I wanted to hear the actual debate from the actual thread! So I asked Claude 3.7 to build this for me as a browser-only app. It just needs a thread URL and an Elevenlabs API key (this all remains in your browser, you can…
- 1IB
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
- 2HR
2021 · hackernews.roundtable.audio
- 3TH
We've been running The HN Recap for a month to make it easier to consume Hacker News. While this was a PoC in understanding adoption for AI-generated podcasts, we now plan to keep this going, since lots of people are now listening to this daily. Let us know what other content channels you'd like to receive as Podcasts and we'll get on it. Read more about our learnings here → https://wondercraft.ai/blog/learnings-from-1-month-of-ai-pod...
2023 · hackernewsrecap.buzzsprout.com
- 4HU
I feel like it was inevitable, with the recent buzz around NotebookLM. I'm just surprised that it hasn't been done yet.
2024 · hnup.date
- 5IW
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
- 6HN
I'm Seth, creator of discourse.fm, a browser-based tool/platform to create live audio chat rooms. I just launched an extension of the site - https://hackernews.discourse.fm/ - which pulls stories in real-time from the HN site using the public API, and enables anyone to join a live audio discussion about the story (think Clubhouse rooms autogenerated for HN stories). Once you enter a room, you can grab the link generated for a room and paste it back to the comments on the HN story to invite more participants. hackernews.discourse.fm is both a full-fledged product and a…
2021
- 7QAQ&A for HN users▲142
2012 · askolo.com
- 8EH
2024 · blog.wilsonl.in
- 9HC
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
- 10ZA
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
2023 · zsync.xyz
- 11TH
Hi HN, Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them. So I thought it'd be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to podcasts. Initially, I tried out narrating articles with latest text-to-speech synthesis from Amazon and Google, but it was still pretty bad. Especially with long form content. So I thought I'll do this with real humans, real voice actors. So I made ReadByHumans. [1] We are starting…
2017
- 12SH
I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…
2024 · searchhacker.news
- 13T1
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
- 14AT
Hi HN, I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here. Three things in this post: 1- The interesting groups of HN posts 2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser 3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles. Blog post about this whole process here: [1] ============ 1- The interesting groups of HN posts From the…
2022
- 15CW
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
- 16HM
2012 · hnpod.com
- 17
- 18IH
Hi, I have published a mobile app to have coffee chat with HN users. There was already a guy who made a website for this, but I wanted to do it in mobile to practice WebRTC(technology behind the audio chat) and have some fun. I haven't spent too much time in terms of the general functionality as a HN client but can upgrade it if there are enough users enjoying the app. You can download the apps via the links below; IOS: https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/betternews-coffee-chat/id65047... Android: As you might have known, Android requires the app to be tested in a…
2024
- 19HB
I made a HN client that allows you to explore comments in a breadth-first manner. Compared to the classic depth-first approach, it works much better for the larger threads - you don't lose the context and can easily skip discussions you're not interested in. Video preview: https://imgur.com/a/tzBdpXw
2025 · apps.apple.com
- 20CW
2012 · rabblr.com
- 21IM
I was struggling with navigating HN discussions using existing solutions, so I decided to implement a completely different approach, think of it as depth-first reading vs breadth-first reading. Visually it looks like swipeable stacks of comments and it offers several advantages over traditional interfaces: - Comment width doesn't get narrower no matter how deep in the comment tree you are - You always see the parent of the comment you're currently reading - Swiping allows you to move in and out of subtrees with animated transitions that you fully control - You can easily skip subtrees that…
2023 · apps.apple.com
- 22HD
Hey HN! Started out with an idea over the holidays to start building a system that creates daily digests of content I follow as a podcast, such that I can listen to it when commuting. The first one is one that takes the top articles of HN in the last 24 hours and builds them into a podcast. It took forever to tweak it in such a way that it doesn't sound 100% AI, isn't too sensational, but also not extremely boring. I've been tweaking over the past weeks to get it just right and I'm pretty happy with what comes out of it now. I've just submitted / got them all up and running on Spotify…
2025 · hackernews-daily.thepodcastcollective.com
- 23GL
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
- 24AN
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
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