Alternatives
Products that do what I made a website even my tech un-savvy parents can use to find a laptop does
Whenever my parents need a new laptop, they ask me for a recommendation because they’re not very tech savvy. Last time around, I had a realization that I’m fairly algorithmic with my recommendations: I gather information about their preferences and functional needs and then match those to options I can find online. This website (https://easylaptopfinder.com) attempts to provide a simple UI to intake information about what someone needs and apply the results to a matching algorithm against a list of products. I think it’s cool because sites like Amazon have tons of options but very…
- 1IB
2020 · usb-hubs.org
- 2LC
2016 · laptophits.com
- 3LP
In the responses to Low Cost Mini PCs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41389931), I saw some requests for a similar site but for laptops. To improve on existing tools like https://pcpartpicker.com/products/laptop/, I added PassMark scores (with a lot of regex!) and live prices from Amazon. I also added panel types and refresh rates, and sorted results by a weighted rating, which takes the number of reviews into account. Please let me know if you have any suggestions, thanks! P.S: you can sort by multiple columns using ctrl+click (thanks to…
2024 · comparelaptopprices.com
- 4SL
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
2011
- 5NC
2017 · noteb.com
- 6

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- 8TR
I decided to cut all the other features and just release the startup I have been working on for the last few months. http://seekier.com I hate to put it like this, but look at it as a twitter for sharing what you search. Seekier lets you see what others are searching, allows you to share your own searches, and discover more through discussion. Please let me know what you think of the idea and concept. There may be bugs because I decided to just release it. Thanks! If you decide to register, be great if you posted your profile.
2010
- 9IT
I created http://devtest.net as a weekend project, and I'm pretty proud of it from a technical and UI standpoint. The problem is, I've built this by myself in a bit of a vacuum, to "scratch my own itch", and I don't know if this is useful to anyone other than me. I'm also not so hot on the business side and don't really know what I'm doing. Basically, I'm looking for some advice, now that I've actually launched, what now? One thing that this has shown me is that I'm capable of putting together a pretty decent web application on my own in my spare time. Should I stick with this idea, or…
2012
- 10IM
It's dead simple. There's no fancy interface. Basic features are gone. That's all on purpose. If you're like me, you're always writing down ideas on pieces of paper. My webapp is like that, but for the internet. Let me know if you find it useful.
2012 · ideab.in
- 11RI
Yoooo HN, I'm Lucas Schiavini and I built Regrets.io, a platform to share regrets and to let your inner curious child endlessly look for pros in cons in everything. It's supposed to be simple and scrollable and a place for you to research anything you want and get easy pros and cons. So why not just use reddit? I've been on endless reddit threads on posts to gather all the info I needed to buy my legion go, my remarkable tablet, my new macbook, and I'd really love to find all their info under one page, extra points if an ai can summarize the pros and cons from the user answers(regrets.io…
2024 · regrets.io
- 12FF
A little while ago I built an automated website that finds free stuff while filtering out scams. It works in an interesting way. Most freebie sites on the web contain a mix of real, useful free stuff and scammy affiliate and pyramid schemes. I realized that affiliate links are always unique (because they need to contain an affiliate code) while real freebies have URLs that co-occur across multiple sites at roughly the same time. I wrote a crawler in Perl and MySQL that looks for repeating, off-domain URLs that temporally cluster on multiple free stuff sites. I was surprised and pleased to…
2011
- 13HF
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the goal to reduce my dependence on online search engines. Hister is basically a full text indexer for websites which saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore previously visited content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines. I've been using it for more than a month now and as my local index is growing I can avoid opening google/duckduckgo more and more frequently. The project is still heavily under…
Feb 2026 · hister.org
- 14IB
I made this simple site that tells you which travel adapter you need for your next trip. I found myself googling this info and always being linked to a random article that was super long. Decided to make this crisp page that gives key info above the fold. Built with NextJS + Tailwind. I'd love some feedback and what should I add?
2024 · checkplug.com
- 15IB
Hi HN, For the last 18 months, I've been working solo on building a completely independent search engine from scratch. Today, I'm opening it up for beta testing and would love to get your feedback. The project powers two public sites from the same 2-billion-page index: Searcha.Page: A session-aware search engine that uses a persistent browser key (not a cookie) for better context. Seek.Ninja: A 100% stateless, privacy-first version with no identifiers at all. The entire stack is self-hosted on a single ~$4k bare-metal EPYC server in my laundry room (no cloud, no VC funding). The search…
2025
- 16IM
Hi hn! It has always annoyed me that recipe websites are so cluttered and have so much (in my opinion) useless fluff, so I made a little website to solve that problem! One good thing about SEO for once is that Google has pretty much forced the internet to adopt JSON-LD for recipes so many recipes are directly extractable and for others I have several fall back parsers including an indieweb parser :) If you do find a website that is broken feel free to click the flag button or share it as I would love to fix any edge cases
Apr 2026 · tangled.org
- 17

- 18MW
Just deployed my weekend project. It's a mashup of Petfinder results with Google Maps. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, suggestions, etc. Thanks!
2010
- 19SN
2020 · searchmysite.net
- 20VE
A bit late in the new diskprices-like website trend, but here's my contribution to the ecosystem. The goal here is to get an instant comparison of the laptops on ebay, using mostly 3 metrics of now: CPU benchmark rank, GPU benchmark rank, and price, without having to scroll through the item description or google the PC model. At the moment there are some parsing bugs, and some components that aren't parsed yet. I also quickly run into the ebay rate limit, making it hard to maintain an hour-by-hour listing. Curious to know what you guys think!
2024 · laptopscout.xyz
- 21SA
Hello HN, I’m Sidwyn and I built a Chrome extension called Score. Score searches the web to find you similar, better options for cheaper. It analyzes product images as you browse, finds visually similar items, and sorts them by price or similarity. This lets you discover affordable options. I started Score when I discovered my friend’s identical TV stand had cost >50% less – and so the idea popped into my head. If I could auto-image search as I browsed the web, I could probably save a ton of money. So I created Score. And I’ve saved a few hundred dollars since. Score works really well for…
2023 · getscore.app
- 22FF
This was my last weekend project, but due to school, wasn't able to finish it till today. Disregard the design and tell me as much of the following as possible: Would you ever use this to search for more current app reviews, or is completely unnecessary? If you like the idea, how would you suggest I improve it? Any and all feedback is welcome. http://www.labs.alexgreene.me/
2012
- 23FS
Hi HN, This is the first site I've built. I know it probably won't be interesting to most of you but I think it's pretty helpful to people interested in makeup: http://www.savvyist.com I hope to make it easier for anyone who wants to get started with makeup, as it can be a really useful tool, and I know firsthand how overwhelming it can be. I learned Ruby on Rails to create it using the amazing book/tutorial by Michael Hartl and some good codecademy courses. I was formerly a User Experience Designer at Nokia & didn't know how to code before then. If you want to know more about…
2015
- 24IB
Hello all, I built about 2 years ago a coding website for kids, teens and adults: https://codeguppy.com Despite my efforts to promote the website it is still not well know. I post almost daily about it on Twitter at https://twitter.com/codeguppy ... but even there I don't have views. The website is fun... although I still have a ton of things to add. I appreciate if you take a look and suggest improvements and most importantly help me with spreading the news about this website. I really need a boost! Thanks all!
2021
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