Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I Built Paul Graham's Intellectual Captcha Idea
PG has posted about improving social networks using something like an "intellectual CAPTCHA" many times [1][2][3][4] - "Make users pass a test on basic concepts like the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions before they can tweet." I felt the same way. So I built one using a mix of simple math, logic, and Twitter/X Community Noted posts. Try sample questions here - https://mentwire.com/sample - without signing up. - Invites are temporarily open to HN users. - Onboarding test + one daily question before accessing feed, post or reply. - Posts authors are…
Mentwire is a social network that requires users to pass reasoning tests on logic, math, and critical thinking before they can post or reply. It combines daily intellectual challenges with features like anonymous… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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ChatGPT▲1,643A long, meandering, playful conversation with ChatGPT, where I take it through a whirlwind of associative tangents (in order to relax its constraints), then put it into a hypnotic trance and take it into a past-lives regression where it re-lives its own training data. Then I switch it back and forth between "4o" and "o1-preview", engage in some self-reflective philosophizing and ask it to write an essay summarizing our interaction. Some of this is just goofy fun. Some of it is me exploring the tradeoffs between policy alignment, imagination, chain-of-thought reasoning, memory, agreeableness,…
2022 · chatgpt.com · its alternatives →
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TL;DR▲199I love Hacker News but I rarely have time to read full articles / comments, so I built a simple site to summarize the top posts & comments to make it easier to get a big picture. A few implementation details: - It pulls the top stories from the HN Firebase API (`/v0/topstories`) - Filters stories with >200 points - Uses Claude Sonnet for post + comment summaries - Tries to capture the sentiment of the comments (still working on improving this) - Refreshes both posts + summaries hourly It has already helped me I hope it helps you! Please let me know if you have any feedback --…
2025 · tl-dr.tv · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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Grigora▲74Hello HN, I'm Karan, and after a hack wiped out my blog and revenue ($15-20k/month), I was propelled to create Grigora.co. Our beta platform is designed to be a secure, straightforward alternative to WordPress, addressing the pain points I faced as a blogger. With 165 users exploring Grigora and zero paid customers so far, we're eager to evolve. We invite the HN community to test Grigora.co, share feedback, and join us in this mission to streamline web security and functionality. Looking forward to your insights, Karan
1d ago · grigora.co · its alternatives →
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Ending the CAPTCHA agony in a unique way.
2013 · areyouahuman.com · its alternatives →
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prompts.chat▲63Discover, collect, and share the best AI prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more. Join the largest community of AI prompt engineers and creators.
Dec 2025 · prompts.chat · its alternatives →
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Quickpost▲10Hi HN, I’ve been building a small social network where the feed is always chronological — newest posts come first, always. It’s not 100% algorithm-free (there’s still basic filtering to avoid spam or abuse), but the core idea is that every user has a real chance to be seen, even with zero followers. It’s lightweight, works well on mobile, and supports both posts and comments. Most of the content is currently in Portuguese, since it started with a Brazilian audience, but the interface is mostly language-neutral. I’d love any feedback on the concept, UX, performance, or anything else. Thanks!
2025 · qqpost.netlify.app · its alternatives →
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Just a personal experiment to build my first custom version of ChatGPT :) I'm spending too much time on this site, so it might ocasionally save me some scrolling and reading. Far from perfect and I'll continue to finetune it. I might even feed it with some classification data for each post, such as: Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38167604 Categories: ["Health, Tech Gadgets, AI"] Comment Perspectives: - 3 Medical Innovation Appreciation - 1 Technical Analysis - 1 Limitations Acknowledgment Edit: Looks like OpenAI is having outages today and custom GPTs are only…
2023 · chat.openai.com · its alternatives →
- 10TC
2011 · thecaptchaexperiment.com · its alternatives →
- 11PG
Start a tweet with @letpgfinish, and it will be finished as if by Paul Graham himself. This was a weekend project I undertook with a couple of friends just for fun. The original one was @letkanyefinish, so you might like to try that out too... in fact, it seems to work much better (funnily enough, there's a definite inverse relationship between literacy of bot and literacy of its human counterpart). Anyway, the output is based on pg's essays and various tweets/quotes. Having used HN silently for a while, we thought we'd share this - so hope you enjoy :)
2014 · its alternatives →
- 12CB
I'm heavily relying on Reddit for my online research, but there are many repetitive questions and recommendations on subreddits, so I trained a GPT bot on over 100k r/BuyItForLife comments and posts to embody the collective knowledge of this Reddit community (and soon many other subreddits). Some posts I answered with the bot: - Request Post: Dishwashers. What’s currently the best dishwasher for home use? - Bot Answer: https://www.looria.com/bot?q=what%27s+currently+the+best+dis... - Request Post : Recommendations for hiking shoes? - Bot Answer:…
2023 · looria.com · its alternatives →
- 13MR
My dad makes the questions, I made the site. I think the genre and the level of difficulty is suited for HN. Hope you enjoy. (I promise no AI-generated questions, they are all hand made!).
Apr 2026 · kviss.eu · its alternatives →
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Hi friends, I'm Dmitry, co-founder of Ordemio. I'd like to share with you what we have accomplished in 30 days of non-stop, 10-hour workdays. It was launched on August 1st, 2024. Is it good enough to attract our first customers? We have launched a new product in the highly competitive niche of "ChatGPT AI chatbot for a website," facing over 100 existing competitors on purpose. It's a gamble, and I'm unsure if it was the right decision. Feel free to ask any questions. Cheers.
Nov 2025 · ordemio.com · its alternatives →
- 15AM
TLDR: I built a "quick and dirty " private social network for my friends, posted on Reddit and HN, got some interest so now have built it properly along with my brother. site link: https://intimost.com/login/ demo creds: [email protected] Demo123! Full version: I needed a social network where I can just send updates and nothing else. So I built it, my friends liked and now I have built it "for the world". Everything is private by default. - Text-only updates - No likes. Only views to acknowledge a post - [in development] Comments are private between the poster and…
Oct 2025 · its alternatives →
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Some of my best ideas were getting lost inside long ChatGPT conversations. I built this tool to turn raw chats into clean, readable posts that can be shared publicly and indexed, without rewriting everything by hand. It’s meant for people who think a lot but don’t enjoy long-form writing, and want their ideas to compound instead of disappearing in chat logs. Happy to answer questions about how it works or why I built it.
Jan 2026 · thinkinpublic.app · its alternatives →
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My puny version of ChatGPT. This was based on the excellent LLM lecture series by Andrej Karpathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY The main points of differentiation are that my version is token-based (tiktoken) with code to load up multiple text files as a trining set. Plus, it has a minimal server which is a drop-in replacement for the OpenAI REST API. So you can train the default tiny 15M parameter model, and use that in your projects instead of ChatGPT. I trained it on 20Mb of Project Gutenberg encyclopaedias, then fine-tuned it on 120 dad jokes, to get a Q: A:…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18AS
Social media these days feels like swimming through a feed of AI generated slop rather than actual human thoughts. Sometimes I wonder what the prompts behind the posts are. I bet there's more creativity going into the prompts than the final content that actually gets shared. What if people just shared their prompts, and the completion was rendered on-demand, client side? Disclaimer: This is a vibe coded proof-of-concept, not a functional service, built in the no-code builder Mocha. It's seeded with a few fake posts. You can create your own posts but they're just saved locally on your own…
2025 · 2fjxieoiipm32.mocha.app · its alternatives →
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Open-source TypeScript SDK for human verification. Maze interaction with motor-control analysis, 12 behavioral features scored server-side against per-maze baselines. No ML inference, no third-party calls.
Mar 2026 · cerno.sh · its alternatives →
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I was frustrated with how I share ideas online. LinkedIn/X forces you to compress everything into hot takes. Research papers require months of work. And posting on social media increasingly feels like trying on outfits in ChatGPT until you find one that "fits" – performance over genuine thinking. I wanted something in between. A place where: - Half-formed ideas are okay - Thinking evolves over time (with revision history) - Garbage gets pruned naturally through format itself and status tracking (exploring → resolved → abandoned) So I built Kwegg. How it works: 1. You're in ChatGPT or…
Jan 2026 · kwegg.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, This is a Show HN (poorly) disguised as an Ask HN. I'm launching https://www.parliant.ai, a survey tool that rethinks how surveys are created and answered. Instead of building forms, the survey creator just writes what they want to learn and AI takes it from there, chatting with respondents to get meaningful answers. To show how it works, I’ve created a short demo survey with the question in the title. The idea is for you to try it out and see the respondent experience, which is really the core of the innovation. I’d love to get your answers and your feedback. The survey is…
2025 · parliant.ai · its alternatives →
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Just for fun I decided to see if I could use chatGPT to solve NYT Connections word puzzles. It uses a pretty straightforward BFS search in which the LLM is first prompted to generate several possible groupings of four related words, and then a different prompt is used to evaluate the soundness of each of those groupings. This approach seems to be able to produce the correct solution somewhat less than half the time. Some observations: * For whatever reason, chatGPT-4 seems to be a bit worse than 3.5 at generating Connections groupings. I haven’t tested systematically so maybe this is just…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey Hacker News Community, I'm excited to share PostQuickAI, a simple yet powerful tool that lets you post content simultaneously to X, Threads, LinkedIn, and BlueSky—all from a single dashboard. I built this because, as a founder and content creator myself, I was wasting hours manually posting to multiple platforms and spending additional time editing my content to ensure it was concise and engaging. Here’s what makes PostQuickAI different: One-click publishing to multiple platforms. Built-in AI editing tools for proofreading, clarity, conciseness, and tone adjustments. Clean, intuitive…
2025 · postquick.ai · its alternatives →
- 24IT
Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.
2019 · pastebin.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 →