Alternatives
Products that do what I made a tool to hide HN usernames and reduce bias does
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?
- 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
- 2AH
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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 6HH
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
- 7CH
Little chrome extension I made to collapse comments on HN, feel free to use it if you want.
2014 · github.com
- 8AD
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
- 9HN
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
- 10CE
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
- 11HS
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
- 12HH
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
- 13SH
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
- 14FH
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
- 15HC
2023 · gist.github.com
- 16HP
2023 · github.com
- 17HB
2021 · github.com
- 18HF
I've made a simple Chrome extension for Hacker News: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-favourite-users/hleiemhnepoghplnnhkhpnjeiaifnobo It allows you to add your favourite users to a list, and the extension will highlight them here on HN. Simple, but it prevents me from missing comments made by my friends :) The extension is also open source so feel free to fork it: https://github.com/janhancic/hn-favourite-users I'll appreciate any feedback you can give me. Cheers!
2012
- 19FH
Hi HN! I’ve been lurking for a while, but out of fear of being steamrolled by HN readers or maybe just natural introversion, I’ve always been too scared to post or comment. Which is why 1. this is my first real Hacker News submission 2. my friend Michael and I built "Fake" Hacker News, a place to post and see what AI-generated HN comments might say. Here’s a video of me using fakeHN to test this very submission: https://www.loom.com/share/4b9f4f9d7c77489a86baeb92ec55a1ed?... And an example of one of our generated posts:…
2023 · fakehn.com
- 20HA
It's been 2 years since the initial release [here](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36102610). The initial version was a very basic prototype which was not available anywhere beyond the GitHub repo. You had to install it as a userscript or load the extension manually. Since then, it remained simple but better, new features include: - Improved accuracy by also using comments to help gauge the topic of discussion and the right keywords. - Published as plugin for more browsers: Chrome, Firefox (including android), and more recently Microsoft Edge. - Support for narrow screens…
2025 · github.com
- 21AT
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
- 22AU
This userscript adds archive URLs to the metadata section of HN submissions without breaking the immersion. Here are 2 screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/PdUu6oG GreasyFork: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/452024-hacker-news-anti-pa... Source code: https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall Now let me overexplain. -Why?- I never liked paywalled articles. I understand where they come from, but I don't like where we cross our paths. This is why I don't use major news aggregators anymore. Instead, I spend my…
2022 · github.com
- 23RG
2023 · gist.github.com
- 24RA
2014 · chrome.google.com
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