Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I made a tool to hide HN usernames and reduce bias
Hey HN, I made this tool after I read a pretty interesting pg essay - http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html He talks about changing some HN usernames' colors to orange and then deciding to revert back So I thought it could be interesting to remove usernames entirely. This Chrome Extension just replaces HN usernames with question marks. I've enjoyed using it so far myself and I'm curious what you think about the concept?
This Chrome extension replaces Hacker News usernames with question marks to reduce bias when reading comments and discussions. It's designed for HN users who want to evaluate content on its merits without being… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I made a tool to hide HN usernames and reduce bias launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1US
Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do. Here's Paul Graham:…
2022 · stylometry.net · its alternatives →
- 2
I wrote a small Chrome extension that allows the user to replace all usernames on Hacker News with either the string `anonymous` or a deterministic hashed value.
2023 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →
- 3
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 · its alternatives →
- 4HN
Hello everyone! This is a browser extension that attempts to enhance Hacker News user experience, while your data is kept secure, and private (never leaves the browser). Browsers have evolved significantly since doing a v1 back in 2010, which was one of the contributing factors, for attempting a complete re-take few months ago. Personally, I was surprised how useful it turned out to be when browsing around HN. On the linked page you can find install link(s) from web-browser stores, and demo video/screenshots of the features[1] What do you think ? [1] including, browsing content with…
2023 · carina.app · its alternatives →
- 5MH
Very opportunistic toy project as I saw the domain was up for grabs: 'at.hn' is a little site where people can have their own subdomains for whatever their HN username is (opt-in only by adding a slug to your bio). It doesn't really do much. Just shows your HN bio rendered as markdown plus meta stuff. I'm thinking of adding an aggregated user listing on the homepage so people can explore profiles. There's a bunch of interesting people on HN but discoverability is a bit longwinded. I'm wondering what other features people want. Otherwise shall likely leave it as-is. I remember hnbadges was a…
2024 · at.hn · its alternatives →
- 6
Chrome extension that allows you to filter HN stories using a comma separated list - ShamariFeaster/chrome-extension-hn-filter
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Userscript to hide any HackerNews story with "GPT" in its title. - hn-gpt-free.js
2023 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Little chrome extension I made to collapse comments on HN, feel free to use it if you want.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
humble-hn is a Chrome extension that hides the number of votes and comments of stories, and the karma of users on Hacker News. The objective of this extension is to remove the influence of these numbers on the perception of the content.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10IB
2020 · hn.luap.info · its alternatives →
- 11EH
2016 · comments.network · its alternatives →
- 12
Web Extension: Easily find Hacker News discussions about the page you're currently browsing. - pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Test your HN title against a neural network. Contribute to victorqribeiro/hntitlenator development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Do you ever get tired of all the noise on HN? Contribute to mathiasrw/no-noise-hacker-news development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15AD
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 →
- 16HN
I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
2024 · hn.moritz.pm · its alternatives →
- 17
Hacker News comments sidebar bookmarklet. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
2023 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hi All, since I am consistently overwhelmed with all the all the ai/gpt news on the hn front page I built this simple extension to filter out such articles and show them on the extension popup if I'm in the mood to read. I am interested in the topic but just tired of reading the similar discussions (local models, llama on mac, ai taking away our jobs, etc) all the time. Every few days I search for topics on hn.algolia.com and go over any exciting development. Ironically, since this was the first time I built an extension chat-gpt helped build 90% of the extension since . Also once…
2023 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read). Main website: https://hackersmacker.org Chrome/Edge extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg... Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725 Firefox extension:…
Feb 2026 · hackersmacker.org · its alternatives →
- 20
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 →
- 21
Highlight and tag your friends on Hacker News. Contribute to veggiedefender/hn-friends development by creating an account on GitHub.
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Browser extension for Chrome, Safari and Firefox that adds profile overlays to Hacker News usernames - timdavies/hnprofile
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23SH
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 · its alternatives →
- 24FH
Hey HN. I created this website. https://pj4533.com/hn-overlooked/ It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this. I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I…
2025 · pj4533.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 →