Alternatives
Products that do what Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader does
Hey everyone, I'm Michael, a product engineer at Hyperink. Over the past month or so, I've been developing a rich, social reading experience for our content, freeing us from the stranglehold of MOBI and EPUB file formats. Today, Jeff Atwood generously granted us permission to release half of his book completely free on this Crowd Reader (paid customers get to see all of it there).<p>The problem: paperback/print always wins over digital and arguably e-ink. Our solution: make reading a unique and asynchronously social experience.<p>I've love to get some beta feedback and…
- 1IS
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
- 2AM
Hey HN, I know reading books isn’t everyone’s thing, but it’s certainly been mine for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, I felt like the online book space was missing a platform that does the book community justice. Goodreads is the go-to "social platform", but if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting. So I set out to build what I personally was looking for (but could never find). The goal: to give the book community a more social and streamlined alternative to Goodreads or StoryGraph. We also felt like…
2022 · booqsi.com
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- 5AU
I blew off a bunch of "serious" side work last month and built a tiny little embeddable editing tool that I've wanted to have for Ars Technica since, well, the beginning of internet time. It lets any random user make edit suggestions for writers/editors to consider and act on. I think it's pretty cool and it's gotten some good use over the last few weeks. Of note, it's uses a single-field signup form. Edit administration is currently email based, so all it needs is an email address to get people going. I'm sure I'm not the only person to ever do this, but I basically just turned it on one…
2011
- 6AB
Recently i stumbled on too many clickgates on the Medium blog Towards Data science. Considering that most people publish to share knowledge on Medium and are driven into putting their content behind a paywall, without actually getting paid for it, including myself. I felt like Medium is running the academic publishing scheme. Get free content and get paid for it. So I decided to create a small script to bypass the paywall on Medium, it turns out it also works on other newssites. Heres the website: https://sugoidesune.github.io/readium/ For the curious I will explain the…
2019
- 7AW
Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com
- 8IS
Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.
2013 · github.com
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- 10IM
This is our entry in the "spontaneous event creation" ring. I'd love to hear what HN readers think!
2011 · shoutfast.com
- 11IB
Hey so I am making my own book reader and wanted to share it with y'all on hackernews and I saw a submission talking about DRM free books[0] so I decided to submit this submission on Hackernews to show what I am upto :-D I prefer minimalism so I have created three different flavors of it depending upon the particular use-cases and I have linked the most minimalist one as the submission. If someone is interested in a Epub/pdf reader, I have recently made one: https://epub.mirror.forum/ After making that, I was also feeling the need of having standard book downloads and…
Jun 2026 · epub.mirror.forum
- 12AS
http://readdis.com Hey everyone, Readdis is a project that I've been working on recently and I would love to get your feedback on it. I originally wrote it for internal use to help my team and I better track the links that we send to each other. We found it quite useful so I decided to open it up and see if anyone else was interested. It definitely is at the MVP stage right now with lots of things left to be done. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, ideas, and most importantly, comments on whether or not you find it useful. Thanks! Kevin
2010
- 13IP
To be specific, the content is generated by a GPT-2 based model. https://amzn.to/2TCc0v2 Let me know if you have any questions :-)
2020
- 14AI
This is a first draft of an app that I am working on that is the "anti blinkist (the book summarization app)". I call it Augre (aug-ur - short for augmented reader) and the whole idea is that I want to immerse more, not less in a book. I want to dive deeper into the text, chat with others who are reading the book and get into delicious discussions. It's still early but here are a couple of features: 1. A really solid cross platform epub reader 2. Left sidebar which augments the reading experience with tables, images, maps (and other artifacts coming soon) 3. Book chat where you can chat with…
2025
- 15AB
Recently, I found myself having to read the book "C++ primer" and I just couldn't do it. Maybe my attention span is too little now with Claude and Codex, maybe I'm lazy... but I just couldn't get myself to focus. While reading, I needed something to do. I wanted to talk to the text, I wanted to leave notes, I wanted to use to use my keyboard to quickly flip through pages. The only good available option on a Mac was "Preview" and it was ok, but definitely not there. So I built Quincy primarily for myself. With it you can - "Talk" to the page you're reading, create a quiz about the page, and…
Jun 2026 · tryquincy.live
- 16TN
I’ve been hacking on a project called Bookshelf (https://www.bookshelf.diy/). It lets you take an archive — say, your Substack export, a bunch of PDFs, or even saved HTML files — and turn that into a retrieval-backed GPT that your readers can query. The idea is: instead of scrolling archives, they just ask questions. Answers are pulled only from your original content, with citations. It’s aimed at writers and researchers who want their work to be more discoverable — but without spinning up vector infra or fiddling with RAG pipelines. For context: I’ve always gone back to Paul…
2025 · bookshelf.diy
- 17IM
I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com
- 18WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 19BT
Hi guys. I’m looking for some feedback from the great HN community. I just soft launched the beta version of my humble bookshelf application, bookqueue. I've been working on it as a pet project since 2007. The idea is having a place to track all books you have been reading and having some nice stats around it, with less focus in the social aspects. My own queue can be found here: http://bookqueue.net/caffo You can also create your own at http://bookqueue.net/ Thanks!
2011
- 20GA
hi, TLDR: I’m a programmer/solopreneur who got into online marketing, built a marketplace website, and just finished a book about online marketing that’ll appeal to programmers and other technical types. Now I want to recruit early readers to review it (good or bad–as your please) on Amazon. Any takers (non-binding, of course), contact me here: https://www.jackkinsella.ie/customer_support_requests/new Long Version: Six years ago, I programmed a web app, but it didn’t get much traffic, so I started researching everything on online marketing. I thought the best way to…
2016
- 211R
I wanted to find a product idea to build. "Build things people want," right? So I thought, why not literally find people saying what they want? I wrote a script to collect thousands of Reddit posts where people are looking for a solution or complaining about a problem. Then I used GPT to filter out the noise and score each one based on how viable the idea seemed. Threw together a simple search interface so anyone can explore them. I was planning to build a more advanced paid version of this, but figured I'd share the raw version first to see if it's actually useful to anyone.
Nov 2025 · search.reddit-business-ideas.workers.dev
- 22RA
Hey HN! I built ProRead to solve the problem of getting stalled by walls of text in books or losing the big picture while reading. Key features: • Start from a bird's-eye view, then zoom into any level of detail • Interactive knowledge maps show how concepts connect • Seamlessly navigate between chapter summaries and original text • Ask questions in context with AI assistance • High-quality text-to-speech for any book, any level of summary • Upload any EPUB and start reading immediately We have 9 curated classics (Wealth of Nations, Crime and Punishment, etc.) ready to explore, plus you can…
2025 · proread.ai
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I built Read Fast after realising I was saving hundreds of things to read and reading almost none of them. It automatically turns saved content into a scheduled briefing and sends it to my inbox at whatever time I choose. New version since last post actually allows you to bulk upload URLs. So you can just dump links here and Read Fast will scrape and brief for you. Great for actually reading the things I want to. Curious if that resonates with people?
Dec 2025 · read-fast.replit.app
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