Alternatives
Products that do what I open-sourced my HN comment/reply alerts service does
2 months ago I launched a service that sends email alerts when you get a new comment/reply on Hacker News. I've only been able to acquire 6 users since releasing it (°ー°〃) I tried promoting it here (duuh), Reddit, and LinkedIn. Optimized it for SEO (ranking 3rd on my target keywords). All with limited success. So I've decided to open-source it! Links to... - frontend: https://github.com/mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-fronten... - backend: https://github.com/mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-backend I'm still using it for myself, since there's…
- 1HN
I saw this [0] pretty cool thread by user revskill, and wanted a quicker way to search through it, but also to keep them all in one place so I can read them at my leisure whenever I get time. Right now is like 60 lines of Ruby using Nokogiri, but I will certainly look into it further down the line and improve the list. There's a cronjob checking the thread every 12 hours but I will eventually shut that down and it will become static after that. There are some really awesome blogs in there. I really recommend going through the list, it made my day. [0] "Could you share your personal blog…
2023 · dm.hn
- 2MR
Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…
2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me
- 3HN
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
- 4IB
Hey HN! Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator. You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly. The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit. You don't need an account to post. When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link. I really wanted it to feel…
Nov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run
- 5FH
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
- 6IM
2022 · github.com
- 7HF
I've been working on and off on a Chrome Extension for Hacker News, the extension focusses on improved usability rather than design. I can almost guarantee that after a day you won't want to go back to regular Hacker News. Give it a try, features include: - Improved readability - Quick inline replies from comments page - Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames - Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user - Endless scrolling - Collapsible comment threads - Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer Forks, improvements and comments…
2012 · chrome.google.com
- 8IW
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
- 9CW
Hey HN We loaded a BigQuery dataset of all of Hacker News, every comment, story and user, into camelAI. You can ask questions like: • “When does dang tend to comment during the day?” • “Which domains have gained the most submissions since 2015, year-over-year?” • “How has average comment length changed each January since 2007?” • “Top five users who link to arXiv papers the most.” It's behind a log-in to prevent abuse but free to use for 10 messages. No payment info required. We use OpenAI o3 or Claude sonnet 3.7 for the agent which can be really expensive. Would love feedback especially…
2025 · app.camelai.com
- 10IM
I love HN but always felt the search with algolia is okay but does have some limitations. Since I work at Vectara I decided to try and create a better search for HN. It's based on data from roughly the last 6 months of HN stories and comments. Would love to hear feedback and how useful this is relative to the existing search.
2024 · hackernews.demo.vectara.com
- 11HS
Hi HN! I'm Jonathan and I built Hacker Search (https://hackersearch.net), a semantic search engine for Hacker News. Type a keyword or a description of what you're interested in, and you'll get top links from HN surfaced to you along with brief summaries. Unlike HN's otherwise very valuable search feature, Hacker Search doesn't require you to get your keywords exactly right. That's achieved by leveraging OpenAI's latest embedding models alongside more traditional indexes extracted from the scraped and cleaned up contents of the links. I think there are many more interesting things…
2024 · hackersearch.net
- 12HA
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
- 13GL
Hi HN, I hacked a simple service for gathering HN replies and organizing them by the parent's username. The main idea is to be able to efficiently get the latest replies to an HN user. For example, you can use this service to send yourself notifications when some replies to you on HN. The service queries the official HN API and can be self-hosted. It is basically ~30 lines of Bash script. I made this mostly for educational purposes -- thought you might find it useful for something. Cheers! Edit: for example, here are the latest replies to me [0]. It includes only recent replies, since I…
2022 · github.com
- 14SH
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
- 15AN
Hey HN! I'm excited to share a tool I've been working on - a native Hacker News reader built with Rust and egui. Here's a screenshot: https://github.com/haojiang99/hacker_news_reader/blob/main/s.... As a daily HN reader, I've always struggled with keeping track of interesting posts I want to read later. Browser tabs pile up, bookmarks get forgotten, and I lose track of what I've already read. I needed a way to: 1. Browse HN efficiently (across all sections - hot, new, show, ask, jobs, best) 2. Quickly mark posts as "todo" for later reading 3. Mark posts as…
2025 · github.com
- 16AT
Hi everyone, we developed a tool that can easily tell you the overall sentiment of a message based on a word. For now it’s hacker news only but we think this thing has potential. Whether you’re a startup, solopreneur or product manager, you can track trends with it. We are also planning to add predictive tools and real time analysis. Operationally this tool is a lot cheaper than Sprout Social or other similar solutions on the market. No sign-up required. Just type and see results. I'd love your feedback on the tool's usefulness and any ideas for improvement.
2024 · classysoftware.io
- 17AA
For example, paste this into Slack or Discord or whatever: https://news.ycombinator1.com/item?id=30179549 It works with comments, too: https://news.ycombinator1.com/item?id=30180253 Hastily-developed source: https://github.com/statico/ycombinator1.com
2022
- 18HW
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 19SH
I wrote this small client to read hackernews from my favorite editor. It's currently using an external HTTP API [0] but I'm working on my own proxy [1]. I'd love to actually scrape and cache all the info I need using lisp. However, my time constraints are keeping me away of that goal. I could definitely use some help here! :) I'm also planning to add support for comments and posting new things. Any feedback is highly appreciated! Thank you! [0] http://api.ihackernews.com/ [1] https://github.com/clarete/rhn
2013 · github.com
- 20WL
I just sent out my 100th issue of Hacker Newsletter and announced my newest newsletter: Wayback Letter - http://www.waybackletter.com/ In either a daily or weekly version, you'll get links to great HN articles from the past five years. A great way to see how HN has grown and changed, plus see what was going on at different times. Lastly, there are a ton of great reads to learn from that I never saw the first go around. Would love to get feedback and my goal is to expand this past HN in the future.
2012
- 21IB
Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…
May 2026 · wannalaunch.com
- 22IB
Hey all, I built a Chrome extension (open source) that adds a notification inbox widget (and optional email notifications) inside HackerNews. * This inbox feed shows an unread bubble (Like in Reddit) whenever someone replies directly to your thread or comment. * Optionally, you can enable email notifications for the same. (With batching support) * Makes it easy to navigate to new replies. == URLs == Github Repository : https://github.com/anandrmedia/hn-notifier == How it works? == * This extension uses Engagespot to embed an In-App notification inbox. * It just makes use…
2023
- 23HF
HN Follow lets you “follow” authors on Hacker News, and get email notifications when they post. It was inspired by alerthn.com and hnreplies.com. The app was built in an experimental style. Instead of being a normal app where we store all your data, it is just a wrapper over a series of JavaScript snippets that we guide you through installing, and which you can then customize 100%. The scripts call out to Agolia’s wonderful HN Search API. You can read more about the app’s architecture and it’s motivation here[1]. HN Follow runs on Val Town [2], an online scripting tool my team and I are…
2022 · hnfollow.com
- 24HM
2018 · hnmail.io
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