Alternatives
Products that do what I made a desk toy for people in long-distance relationships does
Hello Hacker News! I've spent the last 6 months or so designing and building this, The Attention Button. It's an IoT desk toy that lets you send a quick nudge to whoever you hold dear, letting them know you're thinking of them. Like a direct line to their attention. It is my first major electronics project and I have learnt so much making it. I'd love to hear what you guys think!
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Hi, I'm a high school teacher from Australia and I've built what I'd like to think is a pretty nifty ChatGPT powered presentation tool for teachers. I'd love it if you could have a look at it and give me some of your feedback. I don't think there's much overlap with the HN crowd and school teachers, but I've been coming here for many years and thought I'd post here and see what you all think. Check it out if you have a minute and I'd be super happy to hear your feedback too. https://www.slidehero.ai/ You can jump in and have a play with the tool all you like ;) Cheers, Eli
2025
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2016 · sharingbuttons.io
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Hey HN friends, I keep getting distracted working from home and always end up watching youtube, browsing blogs like HN or just mindlessly scrolling then I feel like crap because I didn’t do enough. I went through dozens of productivity tools but they’re quite overwhelming to use and none of them actually helped me focus. So I built http://complish.ai, a web-based sidebar that helps me focus on one task at a time. I launched it last month and have over 3,000 users now and I’ll be keeping it free. Would love for you all to try and give some feedback!
2023
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Hello all - Inspired by many who build/assemble for their daughters/sons, I took cue and assembled a two-way communication between my son and his friends. Nothing spectacular. Just basic stuff to talk. He is eleven and doesn't have a phone. I wanted him to talk to his friends without an account, a feed, or an algorithm in between, so I built five ESP32-S3 touchscreen units, one per kid. Tap a friend's name, their unit rings. Tap Everyone, they all ring. Each unit dials outbound to a relay I run, so no house opens a port. Audio is uncompressed 16 kHz PCM in 20 ms frames, AES-256-GCM…
Aug 2026 · sundaradnus.ca
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I made this experimental art project/game that's an LLM chat assistant, but where you're the AI. I wanted people to get a visceral sense of what it's like to answer the kinds of things that people prompt their chatbots day in and day out. If you're interested, I wrote up some more info on how I made it, including how the "user" prompts are generated with an eye for realism: https://bethechatbot.com/about Hope you enjoy it! I'd love to hear people's takeaways.
Jul 2026 · bethechatbot.com
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I really struggle to keep my notes organised, and often can't make any sense of hand written notes after meetings. I did some experiments with Claude and ChatGPT where I blast random thoughts at them during a meeting or brainstorming session and then have them output a nice document that pulls it all together at the end. It worked incredibly well but it was a bit cumbersome to keep sending messages to the chat and telling the ai each time what to do. So I took the idea and built a tool, it makes it easy to throw random notes and voice recordings (images and document support on the way) and…
2025 · scatternote.com
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I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
2014 · urshoutbox.com
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Hey HN, I'm a longtime reader and this is my first Show HN (exciting!) It's a collaboration between me and two friends, and we're building this upon another app we made called EmailYak, an API to receive email. We're trying something new and releasing the documentation to an app while we're still building it. We'd love feedback. Do you belong to any of these categories? 1) You've built an app with two distinct groups of users (say, people with cars and those looking for a ride) and they were able to communicate with each other. Did you expose personal email addresses? Did you send…
2011 · messagify.com
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Hello HN, I've built a prototype of a hardware product that you can attach to your shirt and talk to AI with the touch of a button. I've been thinking about commercializing it, whether people like it or not. Thanks, Masih Minawal
2025 · aibutton.io
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Even though Wave was killed more than 10 years ago, I didn't fully appreciate its value until recently, when I had to spend a fair amount of time in some group email threads discussing complex subjects. Would using chat instead solve the problem? Not really. In my opinion, chats are great for exchanging quick single-line replies. But to have a real discussion and arrive at a meaningful conclusion, we actually need more structure, not less structure. Which made me realize I wanted a product that worked exactly like Wave, but without some of its annoying features. In my opinion, the real-time…
2022 · reresponse.com
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Speak your tasks. AI sorts the rest. Built for ADHD brains.
Feb 2026 · taskmelt.app
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Hi HN! I'm here to share Vibebox (vibebox.app), a little toy app I built to sprinkle joy across your inbox with friendly animal avatars and messages that transform mundane emails into warm, joyful reads. About Vibebox - Transforms your emails with playful visuals and warm messages. - Aims to reduce stress associated with email management. - Promotes positivity within your daily routine. I'd love your feedback! Is this something you'd actually use if it were built out? I'm convinced it's a fun toy app, but a few early beta testers have said it's turning into their favorite way to read email…
2024 · vibebox.app
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Hey guys, I was really inspired when I saw the reception to HackerThings yesterday. We built an app over the course of a few weekends that we've been using personally but not had the time to promote, we're growing organically just via word of mouth & referrals currently. Thinng is a place to create visual lists of all the products you might want to buy, or want people to buy for you. So technically you can use it to create your own list of HackerThings or whatever you are into. Install our bookmarklet, use it when you're on a page with the product & save the image with a…
2011 · thinng.com
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So I've been obsessed with a weird question for the past 6 months, what happens to SEO when everyone starts asking ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling? The answer, apparently, is chaos. And maybe opportunity? I built FirstClick because I noticed something strange. My previous startup was getting zero traffic from AI assistants, but our competitor (objectively worse product, sorry not sorry) was getting mentioned by Claude and Perplexity constantly. It drove me crazy. So I reverse engineered why. Turns out there's a whole new game being played and most founders don't even know it…
Dec 2025 · firstclick.so
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Hey HN, I made conversation starter game. Here's how it works: - Choose a theme like "Couples" or "Favorites" - Tap to reveal thought-provoking questions - Take turns answering and discover new things about each other I made ConvoCards because everyone has an interesting story to tell, but these don't often come up in day to day conversations. I also enjoy using them for journaling and self reflection. I hope you enjoy playing and learn something new about someone close to you!
2024 · convo.cards
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As a product manager I've used different feedback tools and almost never liked the design and experience of the widget. And pricing of some existing tools is just way too high, at least for indie makers or small businesses ($35 for 100 responses...). That's why I've launched Freddy Feedback (today!). You can find it on www.freddyfeedback.com. Curious to hear your feedback (very meta ;-)).
2020
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Hi HN! I'm Amber (13) and my dad Raj, and we built Nityasha AI from Guna, India. After my dad's 12 years of failed startups (2012-2023), we created a personal AI assistant that handles email, coding help, research, and planning in one conversational interface. I started coding at 9 on a 4GB RAM laptop. We failed 8 times before this—coupon sites, freelancing platforms, consulting. Nityasha is different: it uses Thesys generative UI for visual charts, includes Study Mode with Socratic teaching, and integrates everything so you don't need 10 tabs open. 500+ active users now. We just launched…
Oct 2025 · ai.nityasha.com
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I got the idea of [mindmap.so](http://mindmap.so/) out of my own frustration of managing my personal notes in Notion and Miro in parallel. I have built it 3 months back on top of excalidraw, posted it in Reddit a couple of times, and never looked back (was using it only for personal use). Little did I know that the small and nimble tool that I created has crossed 2000+ users (was so surprised when I saw the dashboard last week). It was all organic and word of mouth . Having 2000+ users trusting a product is no easy feat. That’s when I thought may be I should put some more…
2024 · mindmap.so
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