Alternatives
Products that do what How HN helped us pay for our wedding. does
So my fiance and I are addicted to Hacker News and we have learned a lot about startups on here. We had an idea for a startup that would have taken a lot of time and resources to build but thanks to Hacker News we have learned about people like Eric Ries, Steven Blank and the whole customer development strategy. We decided to build the MVP for our startup to see if there was a market for our original idea and also raise money for our wedding. We shaved off all of the crazy features and launched https://www.crowdbundle.com/ Hacker News taught us to build a MVP and make sure there was a market…
- 1FC
Hi HN community! A huge number of startup founders are reading Hacker News, but it's still very hard to make new personal connections here and help each other with product building, growth, or fundraising. As an experiment to make HN founder community more connected, I've created a system of chat groups, organized by location, industry sector, and priority tasks. We were testing it out for the last couple of weeks, starting with 200+ YCombinator alum companies. Now already have 1000+ startups there, and 80+ venture investors have joined to connect with founders early. Many pitch practices…
2019
- 2CW
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
- 3IM
I noticed the who's hiring threads are very popular every month, so I decided to create a job board specifically for hacker news. You can tag jobs, search, view user's profiles and more. Tell me what you guys thing! Any feedback is appreciated.
2013 · hnjobs.org
- 4OS
2012 · blog.elastic.io
- 5FO
HN, I've been mostly lurking, semi-active on HN for over 4 years. For most of that time, I've been working on my startup, Learndot. I have always wanted to do a "Show HN" post, but I never thought it was ready. We've now finally launched web signup and using a freemium business model. I feel I can now post and offer something to the community (a new app to try out) and hopefully get good quality feedback. Here's the site: http://www.learndot.com Would appreciate any or all thoughts: From pricing/positioning, to design/performance. The app is written in Sproutcore and backed by an API written…
2013
- 6SH
This morning I've submitted our project to HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099054 Got pretty helpful feedback. But that wasn't the only thing. 478 people requested invite out of 755. 63% conversion rate. Almost 9K unique visitor visited our website. At some point in the morning I was seeing 400+ active users on the website. Unbelievable. 35 people registered without telling them how to register. ( You cannot register directly, there is only a login form - but they figured out a way :) http://imgur.com/Kbf9J 6K people visited directly from Hacker News, 1K from Twitter ( I guess…
2012
- 7IB
Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…
May 2026 · wannalaunch.com
- 8IB
Hey everyone! My name is Will. I’ve been leading engineering teams for over two decades. Also, first time HN user here! One of the common pains I’d encounter in nearly every product I managed was alerting end users to infrequent events like outages, global announcements, beta launches, planned maintenance, etc. We’d always need to deploy custom, one-off modals or other alerts and then have to remember to revert them later. It was always a time sink for a developer to put aside what they were working on to make this happen. This Is Not A Drill! is a simple-to-install JS SDK that makes it…
2024
- 9AP
Hi HN, I've been a daily user here for almost 15 years. Over that time, my interests have shifted. I find I'm now more interested in deep-dive technical posts and personal blogs than the big tech announcements that often dominate the front page. The "top" feed was starting to feel stale, and I was spending more time digging through "new". So, I decided to build what I wanted: a personalized "For You" feed. Link: https://hn.shaped.ai It's a simple concept: you log in with your normal HN credentials, and as you favorite stories, it learns what you're interested in and re-ranks the…
Sep 2025 · hn.shaped.ai
- 10UO
When I see what some HN members have done in a weekend on their projects, it makes it hard to confess that it has taken us 1 year to get to this stage. I kept trying to make things perfect, but finally I have seen the light - it will never be perfect and even in its current state, I see so much we need to improve, but it's something. Instead of delaying even more, I thought I would release it to the best critics out there - HN say hello to MyProperty.com Hope to hear your feedback, criticism, thoughts.
2011
- 11HN
Friends, Romans, HNers! Link: http://hackerbyte.com This is my first “weekend project” and it was really fun doing it. The sleepless weekends nights when all my friends were our partying or something we (me and two friends) were busy creating ‘hackerByte’ - a weekly newsletter to share inspiration with start-up people. Nothing fancy - just we’d like to share some really nice stuff we read and some news with you, every week. We know that newsletters like these already exist so why one more? Because we are not really satisfied with what they are doing and here is our version of the wheel. We…
2011
- 122Y
We took the top 3 HN stories every day since October 2006 (~21K stories total), ran topic clustering on them, and visualized how topics rise and fall over time. You can zoom into any period - some patterns are surprisingly clear (AI overtaking startup culture as HN's top topic, crypto's rise and fall, remote work spiking with COVID). Happy to answer questions about the methodology.
Mar 2026 · app.lenzy.ai
- 13MGMeet Geisha▲33
For the past couple of months, I’ve been working with a total stranger, @ahmetsulek. We’ve never met in real life, and our communication has been restricted to Skype. And that’s Skype call, not video. Whilst it’s advised that one should only team up with somebody they’ve known for a long time, I’ve found this not to be necessary. Instead, all you need is a dose of mutual respect and a clear partnership agreement. We’ve been working together for the past couple of months on a web app and Chrome Extension that aggregates sites like Hacker News, Designer News, Sidebar.io, Behance and Dribbble…
2014
- 14HT
I have been a fan of hn for a long time. I spent a lot of time lurking and then finally made an account. I have found a lot of the startups getting launched on or through this site as inspirational. I am not a programmer but I do consider myself a hacker. I am originally from Russia but now live in the US. This is my third business and my first online business. I did all of the design and setup of artisurn.com myself using shopify. I would appreciate any feedback or tips from the community on any way to improve on what I have created. I feel that the funeral business is ripe for disruption…
2014
- 15HR
Hey guys, I just flicked the switch on http://hnrecap.com and thought I would make a tiny announcement! The site was created for a simple reason: There is a big rotation of articles on the front page of Hacker News every day, and unless you are on here 24/7, you are bound to miss some great content and discussions. I was tired of this and the rss feed doesn't cut it for me since it doesn't preserve ranking information over time. On HN Recap, rankings are somewhat preserved: Every 2 minutes, I request the HN front page, update articles and attribute points in the following simple fashion: #1…
2010
- 16HL
I am re posting this because when I had made this post the first time there were a few problem with the site that I had to fix and had not anticipated. I got some nice feedback though, so I thought I'd just make one more post because most of the problems have been fixed. HN Live is an alternative interface to Hacker News which provides all of the data on Hacker News in real time. This allows for the real time viewing of what goes into and leaves the trending page as well as the `newest` section. It is just a personal project, and I would like some feedback if you have any. Thanks Site:…
2015
- 17PC
Personal blogs are my favorite part of Hacker News, so I was curious to find out which ones are the most popular. There are tools for finding popular individual posts on HN, but I'd never found anything that aggregates scores across multiple submissions for the same domain, so I decided to build one. I also had a vain curiosity about how my own blog compared to other popular HN authors like Simon Willison and Dan Luu. I had fun making this, as it helped me discover a lot of high-quality personal blogs that weren't on my radar, especially from the earlier days of HN. Suggestions, questions,…
2025 · refactoringenglish.com
- 18IR
Any suggestions are appreciated, stack utilizes Gluestack UI ,Expo, React Native, and Cloudflare Pages. There is a known bug via touch scroll ability on Android, external keyboard's spacebar or mouse works correctly though, currently. If you know about a solution, let me know. Please note, this is just a prototype, it still has a lot of features to be included. I'd like to learn more about how people use HN and how Hacked could help, where other HN clients failed.
2025 · hacked.unlace.app
- 19GY
Hi HN, We wanted to celebrate the new year so we built this little toy. Enjoy it and happy new year! P.S. If you want, take a look at our product (now in early access) - userjam.com
Dec 2025 · hn-2025.userjam.com
- 20HI
I’ll put the tl;dr up front: I built my first web app with HN’s news.arc: http://hubski.com The long version (I can be verbose): Recently, I was in a startup that sputtered out. It was my seed idea, but my contribution was on the design/UI end. We applied to YC fall 2010, and were rejected (rightfully so, in retrospect). My previous coding experience entails a bit of Fortran from undergrad research, and building a couple of simple websites (Frontpage even. o-O). Anyway, I had tons of energy for the project, but lamented not being able to contribute to coding, where it was badly needed. After…
2011
- 21LS
We built this using investor tools. I really wanted to know which startups to work for. Are we on the right track? PS - there's a paywall but if you want to explore more, just DM me your email and I'll give you free access in our db!
2023 · usemassive.com
- 22HN
Based on your feedback (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8874801) we've released a new version of the Hacker News Search. It's accessible through the search box in the footer of Hacker News. We hope you'll enjoy the new minimal design and the additional features. Feel free to give us your dream list of improvements :) ChangeLog: 2015-01-19 - Custom date range picker - Responsive design - New "comments[<>=]X" syntax to filter by number of comments - If the story doesn't have any URL, the link goes to the HN discussion - Here and there cosmetics improvements (less padding,…
2015 · hn.algolia.com
- 23OS
We did a "Show HN post" 6 months back of our startup and we're very excited to show everyone how far we've come as well as the lessons we've learnt so far! It's been a roller-coaster so far and we think there's lot more of the same to come! We did apply for Ycombinator funding but got turned down :( But may re-apply soon :) For those that don't know, our startup is called Scirra and we make Construct 2 which is an HTML5 game engine (http://www.scirra.com). Our engine allows anyone to make HTML5 games without knowing any programming. It's only me and my brother working on this and we're based…
2012
- 24UH
I've setup a bulletin board for the HN community that only accepts registrations from HN users. The idea behind it is to allow members of the community to have open discussions with each other that would otherwise be regarded as off topic. Any and all feedback welcome. http://hnbb.org
2012
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