Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Needle
Hi 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…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2MH
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 →
- 3
Needle 2.0▲582Vibe-automate workflows and earn passive income
Mar 2026 · needle.app · its alternatives →
- 4
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
Aug 2026 · cactuscompute.com · its alternatives →
- 5
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 →
- 6
A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!
2010 · slideshare.net · its alternatives →
- 7
Chatter▲283Discover which reddit investors make it big — and how often
Nov 2025 · chatter-invest.com · its alternatives →
- 8AD
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 →
- 9IB
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 · its alternatives →
- 10FH
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 →
- 11
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 →
- 12SH
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 →
- 13
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 · its alternatives →
- 14
- 15NA
2014 · needlehunt.com · its alternatives →
- 16
For the last few years, I've been working at a non-profit called Hack Club developing tools to support self-motivated teens to learn about technology and build community with other like-minded peers while doing so. This has resulted in the development of a model called "you ship, we ship." We build open source creative coding environments, and when teenagers share the projects they make with these tools, we send them materials to dive deeper into the subject and related technologies. Our approach is predicated on the constructionist idea that people learn best by building things they care…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
One of my favorite things to do over the weekends is to take a sidestep from full time development of Hitlist, my startup, and poke at other ideas that we’d love to eventually address within the travel space. In 48 hours I get to meet new people, learn about the latest technologies, and build
2014 · gillian.im · its alternatives →
- 18
Needle▲12Enterprise-driven, adaptive, automated GenAI Framework
2024 · softwebsolutions.com · its alternatives →
- 19FC
Hi HN community! A huge number of startup founders are reading Hacker News, but it's still very hard to make new personal connections here and help each other with product building, growth, or fundraising. As an experiment to make HN founder community more connected, I've created a system of chat groups, organized by location, industry sector, and priority tasks. We were testing it out for the last couple of weeks, starting with 200+ YCombinator alum companies. Now already have 1000+ startups there, and 80+ venture investors have joined to connect with founders early. Many pitch practices…
2019 · its alternatives →
- 20
PostKing▲37Heya HN, I've been working on a vibe-marketing platform as my primary side project for the last few months. Doing a (very) soft launch today, mainly because I want to use it to challenge how we think about AI-generated content (Some people call it SLOP - bear with me). How PostKing works: I create a statistical model of your existing content - blogs, social posts, university assignment anything you've written. It learns your brand voice, tone, and positioning - not just surface-level writing style, but the actual way you think Generate content across any channel that sounds authentically…
Feb 2026 · postking.app · its alternatives →
- 21AP
Hi HN, I've been a daily user here for almost 15 years. Over that time, my interests have shifted. I find I'm now more interested in deep-dive technical posts and personal blogs than the big tech announcements that often dominate the front page. The "top" feed was starting to feel stale, and I was spending more time digging through "new". So, I decided to build what I wanted: a personalized "For You" feed. Link: https://hn.shaped.ai It's a simple concept: you log in with your normal HN credentials, and as you favorite stories, it learns what you're interested in and re-ranks the…
2025 · hn.shaped.ai · its alternatives →
- 22
Loopn▲7Hey, Hackers! I am incredibly excited to finally share what we've been building: Loopn. For years, my professional networking experience felt more like a chore than an opportunity. I’m sure many of you can relate. My feed became a constant firehose of noise—off-topic posts, viral debates, and endless content that had little to do with my actual career goals. The very platforms that promised connection were paradoxically making it harder to find the right people. It felt like finding a meaningful connection required sifting through a mountain of this irrelevant content. We were all just…
2025 · loopn.io · its alternatives →
- 23
- 24
Hey HN, Out of frustration of keeping up with AI news, I built hackobar. It fetches the AI related news from multiple sources such as HN, arxiv, github trending repos, huggingface, many ai subreddits, twitter handles that cover AI, Tech news outlets, major ai lab blogs and of course the numerous AI news letters that are growing by day. GitHub trending repos isn't "news" but as an engineer it matters. you can't read every arXiv paper or every HuggingFace drop. HN has the best discussions, Twitter has some, newsletters have some. I used to check 5 places and still felt behind. Building this…
May 2026 · hackobar.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 →