Alternatives
Products that do what I put HN discussions next to the article where it belongs does
It it always bugged me when I read or share an article, the discussion lives separately from the article. I imagined being able to add Google-Docs or Notion style comments on any website. We save a snapshot of the website and allow adding discussions that live side-by-side and directly reference parts of the article. HN articles are automatically indexed in https://cooo.link/hackernews and you can add any website, PDFs on https://cooo.link/ Built with SvelteKit, SingleFile(for archiving page), Railway. Solo dev. Would love feedback if you found it interesting!…
- 1
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
- 2HB
Hey guys, I love HN! I wanted to extend the same aesthetic and community towards things beyond tech-related news. I thought it would be cool to get the same quality of community gathered around the latest and greatest research coming out. Let me know what you guys think of what I have so far. It's still early so there are probably bugs and other quality issues. If there's any features missing that you'd want let me know. ALSO, if any of you are familiar with the map of the territory of any particular field, please let me know! Would love to pick your brain and to come up with a 'most…
2024 · papertalk.xyz
- 3IB
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
- 4MR
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
- 5CE
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
- 6SH
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
- 7QS
I have a dedicated HN tab that I come back to and reload multiple times a day to see whats new and hot. I wrote a Chrome Extension to: - quickly scan new articles since my last reload - quickly scan highly discussed articles - open actual articles and discussions in a new tab This links to the source code. The chrome extension is linked at the bottom of the github page. Note: - This extension only operates on the HN front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/news) - The first time you reload the HN front page after installing the extension all articles will get highlighted.
2024 · github.com
- 8ZA
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
2023 · zsync.xyz
- 9HE
Reading submissions here, I often feel intrigued and want to explore more interconnected or similar stories. The process of googling and going back and forth didn't feel natural. So, I made this browser extension that adds a related submissions section for HN's layout. The results are displayed in a sidebar right in the page's layout using HN native style just like other elements. I enjoy being knee-deep in discussions. Many times you're learning about something new, where the topic is either unfamiliar, thought-provoking, or just could use some context that you don't even know about. If a…
2024 · github.com
- 10AT
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
- 11T1
HN has some of the best discussions on the internet, but I don’t love reading 100 comments to find 10 great insights. This site analyzes top HN threads with LLMs and summarizes the key ideas, disagreements, and resources — while preserving links to the original discussion. Useful for revisiting old threads as well. Updated daily, manual-assisted for quality, no spam, fan project only. Would love thoughts from the community. https://hn-discussions.top
Jan 2026
- 12OW
http://www.hnshowcase.com Moses (nnythm) and I browse Hacker News daily. Show HN posts are some of our favorite parts of HN. We wanted to create a way to browse Show HN articles, even those that might not quite make it to the front page. We created http://www.hnshowcase.com last weekend to make discovering projects posted on HN easier. It searches all "Show HN" posts and generates a thumbnail view for each of them. You can sort by submission date, points, and number of comments, and navigate with left/right or j/k keys. We used the following technologies: HN Search API, Pyramid web…
2011
- 13HC
HN is all about the rich discussions. We wanted to take the HN experience one step further - to bring the familiar keyboard-first navigation, find interesting viewpoints in the threads and get a gist of long threads so that we can decide which rabbit holes to explore. So we built HN Companion a year ago, and have been refining it ever since. Try it: https://app.hncompanion.com or available as an extension for Firefox / Chrome: [0]. Most AI summarization strips the voices from conversations by flattening threads into a wall of text. This kills the joy of reading HN discussions.…
Feb 2026 · hncompanion.com
- 14HN
I'm Seth, creator of discourse.fm, a browser-based tool/platform to create live audio chat rooms. I just launched an extension of the site - https://hackernews.discourse.fm/ - which pulls stories in real-time from the HN site using the public API, and enables anyone to join a live audio discussion about the story (think Clubhouse rooms autogenerated for HN stories). Once you enter a room, you can grab the link generated for a room and paste it back to the comments on the HN story to invite more participants. hackernews.discourse.fm is both a full-fledged product and a…
2021
- 15CE
I built a Chrome extension that shows existing Hacker News posts for the current website. Background: Often when I read articles or websites, I find the associated HN posts and discussions at least as interesting as the content itself. I have been wishing for a solution to have all HN discussions for a page I am visiting directly to my fingertips, without searching. In fact, there are already extensions for it, but all of them (at the time of my search) were only developed with Manifest v2 and will therefore soon be deactivated. For this reason (and to get to know the development process of…
2024 · github.com
- 16HW
Hi HN, here's something fun to play with. It takes any HN thread and turns it into an audio conversation so you can listen to the thread while doing other things. I've seen many previous attempts to turn HN threads into podcasts, but they all shared a common issue IMO: trying to reduce the very rich back-and-forth into a single-thread single-reader boring podcast. Instead, I wanted to hear the actual debate from the actual thread! So I asked Claude 3.7 to build this for me as a browser-only app. It just needs a thread URL and an Elevenlabs API key (this all remains in your browser, you can…
2025 · onetake-ai.github.io
- 17HS
Hi HN, TL;DR: I made a website that takes all the top stories on HN and categorizes them into one of ten topics of interest using LangChain and GPT-4. I've always liked the idea of getting a personal mix of news tailored to my interests. Hacker News is pretty close to that ideal, which is reflected in the time I spend on here every day. It's a great mix, but playing with LangChain, I got the idea for a weekend project. Roughly speaking most posts on HN fall into one of these categories: * Programming, Software & Computer Science * AI, Data Science & Analytics * Business & Entrepreneurship *…
2024 · hnto.pics
- 18MB
TL:DR - https://morningbrief.ai/setup Hi, HN -- We're two indie cofounders who bootstrapped a new product to scratch our own itch: there's so much great content out there, but it's hard to find it. Sites like HN serve us like-minded people, but there are many more topics in other non-HN niches. Our idea is this: an email you get once a day, filled with only top articles (posted to HN, Reddit, etc) that match your specific interests. You can specify which interests, and how many links you want. Ranked by our signal score. To start, we built an ingestion engine. In the first few…
2021
- 19BE
We’re George and Ann, and want to share a Hacker News specific browser extension that we have been working on. We all love the rich discussions in HN, but navigating long posts with multiple threads can sometimes be challenging. You get lost in the depth and breadth of the discussion. There are a few AI-based summarization tools, but they typically focus on summarizing the article rather than the comments, and thus miss the essence of threaded discussions. So, we built Hacker News Companion, a browser extension that makes it easy to navigate discussions and understand diverse viewpoints…
2024 · github.com
- 20TH
Hi HN, Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them. So I thought it'd be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to podcasts. Initially, I tried out narrating articles with latest text-to-speech synthesis from Amazon and Google, but it was still pretty bad. Especially with long form content. So I thought I'll do this with real humans, real voice actors. So I made ReadByHumans. [1] We are starting…
2017
- 21NC
http://mindovermatter.it/ Just a quick and dirty hack I did while learning Go and how to set up an EC2 server. A proof of concept for a feature I think it would be useful on HN. It often happens that I read the whole thread of comments for a discussion, and get back to it at a later time to see the updates. It's hard to see at a glance which comments are new and which ones I already read. The app uses cookies to record the last time you accessed a discussion thread, and modify the html in order to highlight the new comments (the ones added since your last GET of the page).…
2013
- 22AH
Hey folks, http://dstill.ai/hackernews is alternative frontend for Hacker News, with some features on top: (1) AI powered summarizations. Summaries are generated for the link, for the post and for the discussion. Summaries are automatically generated for selected top stories, but you can also generate them on demand — currently this requires supplying your own OpenAI api key (which gets stored in your browser in localStorage). When you generate a summary, everyone else can see it and benefits from it as well. Here are some examples: Summary of a long discussion:…
2023 · dstill.ai
- 23HR
Hey guys, I just flicked the switch on http://hnrecap.com and thought I would make a tiny announcement! The site was created for a simple reason: There is a big rotation of articles on the front page of Hacker News every day, and unless you are on here 24/7, you are bound to miss some great content and discussions. I was tired of this and the rss feed doesn't cut it for me since it doesn't preserve ranking information over time. On HN Recap, rankings are somewhat preserved: Every 2 minutes, I request the HN front page, update articles and attribute points in the following simple fashion: #1…
2010
- 24SH
HN has been a destination on the Web for me recently, but I've had trouble really _getting into_ it. I realized that was because there wasn't an intuitive way for me to browse through articles, comments and authors. I started working on a GreaseMonkey script for myself and, as I got into it, decided I would share it with others who may be interested. SuperHN keeps everything on one page and adds keyboard navigation. 'W' and 'S' browse through articles, 'A' and 'D' cycles through an article, its comments and poster. It also makes the front page a bit more readable. You can get Super Hacker…
2010
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