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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to My recommendation engine for Hacker News

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…

HN Recommend is a search tool for Hacker News that helps users find related articles and discussions from the site's archive. Users input a sentence or article URL to discover popular and similar posts on the same… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. My recommendation engine for Hacker News launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    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 · its alternatives →

  2. 2AD

    We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…

    2024 · hn.trieve.ai · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    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 · its alternatives →

  4. 4HA

    HN Academy collects, ranks, and showcases the best online courses and MOOCs that have been recommended on Hacker News.

    2019 · hn.academy · its alternatives →

  5. 5MH

    Hey HN! I just published https://meet.hn, a map to find hackers in your city. How it works? Demo of the signup process: https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329 1. Fill the form: username, city+country 2. Copy the text generated in the box below the form, and paste it in your HN description. 3. Click "Add me on the map" Optionnaly (it's recommended!) you can add links to your socials as well as some tags to showcase your interests. Why does it exist? I created this because, despite its harsh reputation on the internet, I love the HN community. I…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Community, All the HN belong to you. This is an archive of hacker news that fits in your browser. When I made HN Made of Primes I realized I could probably do this offline sqlite/wasm thing with the whole GBs of archive. The whole dataset. So I tried it, and this is it. Have Hacker News on your device. Go to this repo (https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook): you can download it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's…

    Dec 2025 · hackerbook.dosaygo.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    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 →

  8. 8HC

    There's been lots of discussion recently about finding other HNers to talk to / bounce ideas off / work with, some Google spreadsheets were set up to share details but they were soon vandalised. I had a spare afternoon yesterday (which turned into a long day) and here's the result: http://www.hackernewsers.com/ It's only open to people with HN accounts, it lets you post your biography, location, skills etc. Anyway, I hope you like it and find it useful.

    2010 · hackernewsers.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9SH

    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 →

  10. 10

    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 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    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 · its alternatives →

  12. 12HN

    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 · its alternatives →

  13. 13AT

    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 →

  14. 14FH

    Hey HN. I created this website. https://pj4533.com/hn-overlooked/ It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this. I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I…

    2025 · pj4533.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hey HN, I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Hacker News design. I previously launched Modern for Wikipedia [1] here back in December, and it seemed like the obvious next choice to build one for HN too! So I've taken what I learned from building that, and have spent all my spare time this year building Modern for HN. I realize this won't be for everyone, but it was a fun project to work on, and I'm really happy with the result so far. Hope you like it too! Lots more planned for future updates, and suggestions welcome :) [1]…

    2022 · modernhn.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16IB
  17. 17HA

    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 →

  18. 18FH

    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 · its alternatives →

  19. 19HB

    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 · its alternatives →

  20. 20HN

    The best ideas are both simple and outlandish.

    2012 · normansoven.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hi folks, I've built an alternative Hacker News front page. It is inspired by and meant to be a replacement for hckrnews.com. I built this because HN is woefully underfeatured, but most sites that try to improve it seem to assume that the visual design is the problem. hcker.news tries to maintain HN's familiarity while adding useful enhancements. There are three primary views: - Timeline View: Browse top stories by votes or comments grouped by day, week, or month (e.g., top 20 per day, top 100 per week). - Aggregate View: See top stories by votes or comments over custom time ranges. - Front…

    2025 · hcker.news · its alternatives →

  22. 22HR
  23. 23
    HN2Map▲132

    Search & read Hacker News visually on an interactive map

    2023 · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    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 · hnshowcase.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 →