AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Needle – An Explorable Map of the News
Hey HN! I wanted to know what was going on in cities/towns where my friends live, so I built Needle. It uses an LLM + Open Street map to best estimate general locations of stories posted in the past day, and pin them on the map. For stories involving multiple places, I also wanted to show the relation between them. It's still a little janky, and is limited to mostly Canadian sources of news at the moment, but I'm planning on expanding it shortly, as I'm keen to see what international sources are writing about my home city. Let me know if you have any questions/feedback!
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1MH
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 →
- 2
- 3
For the past few months, I've been working on a website that answers two different questions: - Where in my city have the best travel times to all the things and people I care about? - Given a listing, how far is it from all the things and people I care about? Personally this was fueled by my own frustrations when I was apartment hunting in NYC. I was frustrating to have to juggle so many Google Maps tabs when I was evaluating a listing, and it was also annoying to not have full confidence that I was even searching in the right places. I wanted to be close to work, a Trader Joe's, and a…
2025 · theretowhere.com · its alternatives →
- 4
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 →
- 5AN
Hi all, Made a little app, its at http://newsinamap.com This is my first project and HN was a source of inspiration I thought of sharing it here. Feedback would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.
2012 · newsinamap.com · its alternatives →
- 6
- 7
Hello HN! We're a small team in Kyoto building a website called dédédé (https://dedede.de/en) that invites people to share the various positives, negatives, oddities, etc. they find in urban spaces. The project grew out of an earlier effort where we'd built an app that assisted participatory urbanism workshops run by local nonprofits. With the new platform, we're trying to build something similar but more casual and hopefully with broader appeal, that'll be fun to use even outside of formal workshop situations. We'd love to hear your thoughts!
2025 · dedede.de · its alternatives →
- 8
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 · its alternatives →
- 9HN
Hey Everyone! We made a hacker news map so you can hang out with other readers in the cities you're in: https://summerplaybook.com/g/HN-Map/e2e3d3bc5699417b8c54bbb252bebbf1?in=v6&rn=hn We run this website, summer playbook, which helps college students meet others near them over the summer Thought we'd toss up a hacker news map while we're at it. Catch us around the birthplace of YC, Cambridge, MA, if you sign up :) It could use a little polish on some of the edges but it gets the job done. The goal here is just to help people meet others around them. Though we…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 10SH
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 →
- 11
Needle▲21Hi HN, I am Vaibhav - a founder based in Bangalore, India. Most founders build without knowing who their real competitors are or what users are actually asking for right now. We usually search Google, Twitter, Reddit manually and hope to catch signals - but it’s slow and incomplete, hence easy to miss important conversations.. This is exactly what Needle solves. I built Needle because I kept struggling to answer a basic question while building MoveOnFromYourEx (Ai tool that helps people move on after a breakup): "Where are the people who are already talking about the problem I am solving?" I…
2025 · useneedle.net · its alternatives →
- 12
One station to find per day, 2 or 3 gamemodes depending on the city (if your city is not live yet, or you can't find it in the selector, try https://dailymetro.live/cityname/mode/classic ) Like https://dailymetro.live/sf/mode/classic for San Francisco Got huge traction in France, so I thought maybe you'll like it here too :) Made with Claude code but still took at least 50-100h of dev/design/taking user feedbacks ahahah Hope you like it
Aug 2026 · dailymetro.live · its alternatives →
- 13
Hey everyone, I started Village because I couldn't find a place online with reasonable, civil discussion about my city, Toronto. On Reddit, r/toronto could be a bit harsh and was pretty heavy with downvoting. Local blogs had comments sections that were mean and insulting. Village is an experiment. It's a place that- while honest about the challenges my city faces- tries to celebrate and share what's awesome about Toronto too. It's a place for reasonable and civil discussion. It's a place to discover awesome and interesting things in Toronto. I custom wrote the software for Village but I…
2014 · itsonvillage.com · its alternatives →
- 14RC
Source code / dataset: https://github.com/emeth-/geocities-browser
2022 · randomgeo.city · its alternatives →
- 15
arXiv-news▲11Hey HN! I built arXiv News (https://arxiv-news.com) – a discussion space for research papers. The problem: I browse arXiv constantly for new papers, but there's nowhere good to discuss them. Twitter is chaotic, Reddit is fragmented, and arXiv itself has no comments. So I cloned HN's design (using https://github.com/clintonwoo/hackernews-react-graphql) and applied it to arXiv. Upvote papers, comment, sort by hot/new/discussed, filter by category, post ideas/papers you've found. A daily scraper pulls all new papers automatically. I'd love to hear…
2025 · arxiv-news.com · its alternatives →
- 16WD
Hi guys, wanted to show my (few) weekends project: http://wherehop.com A free app for you to basically see the best neighbourhoods to live in in many cities around the world. It uses data pulled from various sources to rank the best areas to live. Let me know your thoughts and how it can be improved.
2017 · its alternatives →
- 17IB
Think of HackerNews, but only for AI content. Did build this out of the wish for easier discoverability of new technologies in the AI/ML space. Obviously, so far only a tiny small community, but maybe a few of you find it nice to be around and want to post a link there every now and then :)
2023 · news.aiapipro.com · its alternatives →
- 18AN
We just released a new weather website using all sorts of awesome web technologies. We use ModestMaps to show tiled, animated radar and satellite data, Raphael.js to show historical averages and record high/lows, and MapQuest's new Nominatim service sitting on top of OpenStreetMap to do location lookups. We're really proud of this site and would love to hear your feedback and to have try it out: http://preview.my-cast.com/
2011 · preview.my-cast.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hey folks! This is a project that I've been working in my free time for the past few months. It's a news aggregator that uses AI to select relevant articles and summarize them. The default sources are frameworks and libraries' updates, popular HN topics, and languages' subreddits threads that make past a certain threshold. You can run a local instance (needs an OpenAI key) and customize it with your own sources, and adjust the prompt as well. The resulting website can be browsed at https://dev-radar.com/ My next experiment will be with local news. I'm building some feeds with…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20RIRyd.io▲9
Ryd.io As a capstone project for Galvanize's data science immersive I took another look at the NYC Taxi data set. A ton of analysis has been done on individual rides/cars and I was curious about what story would be told by looking at this data through the aggregate. Through the clustered map you can identify different 'personalities' of the city with a birds eye view. Check it out here http://ryd.io/cluster_map I've just spent past couple weeks working hard on this project and would love to talk to anyone about it if they are interested. After the conclusion of the…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 21
Been feeling a bit left out in this fast paced world of ML/AI, so built my first ML project since college. The idea is to scrape the most recent HN article titles and use TF-IDF and cosine similarity as metrics to rank articles that you're interested in to filter out only relevant things. Hopefully a fun project for beginners to get inspiration to jump into this world.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22SM
Twitter is often my source of Hacker News, but I had a problem of getting just the news without HN comments, which many times are even better than news itself, so I came up with an idea to have news and comments under the same URL. I parse RSS feeds, put new items in database, get bit.ly short link and post all to Twitter. Links on twitter are like this http://xcode.x10.mx/?id=2411858 and to see HN comments all you need is to move mouse over the handle on the left side. What do you think? Like it, have any suggestions, ideas or anything else in mind feel free to speak up. I'm happily using…
2011 · xcode.x10.mx · its alternatives →
- 23TC
2017 · travelmap.net · its alternatives →
- 243G
Hello, I have worked on this side project for some months to visualize what's happening in the world on a daily basis. Would love to hear what you think of it !
2024 · w0rld2day.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 →