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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o

Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…

This tool creates an interactive map of books frequently mentioned in Hacker News discussions about reading. It scraped 20,000 comments from reading-related threads, extracted book references using GPT-4o mini, and… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Thinking, Fast and Slow - with 523 comments from the Hacker News community

    2021 · hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.

    2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · its alternatives →

  3. 3HA

    Hey there HN! I wanted to share a pet project of mine. I built HackYourNews [1] to scratch a personal itch: Knowing which stories to focus on while browsing aimlessly (though there is a certain joy in that, as well!) HackYourNews uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to summarize the destination article as well as the comments section. Summarization of the article is always cached, while summaries of the comments are regenerated if the comments count is >10% (or >10 comments) different. While I styled the homepage to welcome HNers, my preferred view is the Mobile view, accessed from the navbar. This…

    2023 · hackyournews.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4IS

    Hi everyone, For the past couple months I've been working on a website with two main features: - https://book.sv - put in a list of books and get recommendations on what to read next from a model trained on over a billion reviews - https://book.sv/intersect - put in a list of books and find the users on Goodreads who have read them all (if you don't want to be included in these results, you can opt-out here: https://book.sv/remove-my-data) Technical info available here: https://book.sv/how-it-works Note 1: If you only provide one or two…

    Nov 2025 · book.sv · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    End-to-end deep dive of the project, spanning a large GPU cluster, distributed RocksDB, and terabytes of sharded HNSW.

    2025 · blog.wilsonl.in · its alternatives →

  6. 6TB
  7. 7

    So far I've used it to reference ideas from books I've read before. I've also used it to explore books I have not read before by asking the bot questions. Some people have told me they use it like a reading companion. They pause while reading the book if they have a question, and use Konjer to answer it.

    2023 · konjer.xyz · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Kooba▲141

    An interactive graph for finding new books

    2017 · its alternatives →

  9. 9SC
  10. 10IM

    As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for. I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4]. To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric. I would…

    2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech · its alternatives →

  11. 11AT

    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 · its alternatives →

  12. 12MB
  13. 13WS

    We’ve trained a generative AI model to browse the web and answer questions/retrieve code snippets directly. Unlike ChatGPT, it has access to primary sources and is able to cite them when you hover over an answer (click on the text to go to the source being cited). We also show regular Bing results side-by-side with our AI answer. The model is an 11-billion parameter T5-derivative that has been fine-tuned on feedback given on hundreds of thousands of searches done (anonymously) on our platform. Giving the model web access lessens its burden to need to store a snapshot of human knowledge…

    2022 · beta.sayhello.so · its alternatives →

  14. 14HN

    The use of the em dash (—) now raises suspicions that a text might have been AI-generated. Inspired by a suggestion from dang [1], I created a leaderboard of HN users according to how many of their posts before November 30, 2022—that is, before the release of ChatGPT—contained em dashes. Dang himself comes in number 2—by a very slim margin. Credit to Claude Code for showing me how to search the HN database through Google BigQuery and for writing the HTML for the leaderboard. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933

    2025 · gally.net · its alternatives →

  15. 15SH

    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 →

  16. 16

    The network graph that holds all the wonderful reads I've ever found on the internet.

    2022 · prashantbarahi.com.np · its alternatives →

  17. 17KG

    Hi HN! My latest side project is knowledge graph that maps the French culinary network using data extracted from restaurant reviews from LeFooding.com. The project uses LLMs to extract structured information from unstructured text. Some technical aspects you may be interested in: - Used structured generation to reliably parse unstructured text into a consistent schema - Tested multiple models (Mistral-7B-v0.3, Llama3.2-3B, gpt4o-mini) for information extraction - Created an interactive visualization using gephi-lite and Retina (WebGL) - Built (with Claude) a simple Flask web app to clean and…

    2025 · theophilecantelob.re · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi HN! I've found this visualization tool immensely helpful over the years for getting an intuition for how an LLM "sees" some piece of text, and with a bit of elbow grease decided to move all compute to client side so I could make it publicly available. I've found it particularly useful for - Understanding exactly how repetition and patterns affect a small LM's ability to predict correctly - Understanding different tokenization patterns and how it affects model output - Getting a general sense of how "hard" different prediction tasks are for GPT-style models Known problems (that I probably…

    2023 · perplexity.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    How to think about data

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20MO
  21. 21
    TL;DR▲199

    I 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 →

  22. 22

    When I read papers, I have to jump between multiple tabs to find the dataset, code, videos, peer reviews, and so on. I tried to fix this with this project. It started as a project just for papers on arXiv, but after its initial success on Twitter (got like 1.9k views: the most I have gotten for a post), I have now expanded it to include other openly available papers from PubMed Central, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and eLife. These papers have been linked with their genes, proteins, diseases, drugs, clinical trials, 3D protein structures, code, and cited and similar papers. This project now has four…

    Jul 2026 · tomesphere.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Public datsets made with https://getomni.ai/. Contribute to getomni-ai/datasets development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    I was struggling with navigating HN discussions using existing solutions, so I decided to implement a completely different approach, think of it as depth-first reading vs breadth-first reading. Visually it looks like swipeable stacks of comments and it offers several advantages over traditional interfaces: - Comment width doesn't get narrower no matter how deep in the comment tree you are - You always see the parent of the comment you're currently reading - Swiping allows you to move in and out of subtrees with animated transitions that you fully control - You can easily skip subtrees that…

    2023 · apps.apple.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 →