Alternatives
Products that do what New comments highlighted in HN discussions does
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).…
- 1
- 2CH
Little chrome extension I made to collapse comments on HN, feel free to use it if you want.
2014 · github.com
- 3T1
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
- 4IW
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
- 5IB
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
- 6ZA
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
- 7HR
2016 · hnreplies.com
- 8AC
2021 · chrome.google.com
- 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
- 10EH
2016 · comments.network
- 11QAQ&A for HN users▲142
2012 · askolo.com
- 12AT
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
- 13CW
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
- 14HC
2023 · gist.github.com
- 15IM
I was struggling with navigating HN discussions using existing solutions, so I decided to implement a completely different approach, think of it as depth-first reading vs breadth-first reading. Visually it looks like swipeable stacks of comments and it offers several advantages over traditional interfaces: - Comment width doesn't get narrower no matter how deep in the comment tree you are - You always see the parent of the comment you're currently reading - Swiping allows you to move in and out of subtrees with animated transitions that you fully control - You can easily skip subtrees that…
2023 · apps.apple.com
- 16QS
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
- 17HW
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
- 18BH
I'm sharing a userscript for for those who read the HN comments section a lot: 1. Updates comments without reloading the page — instantly see new ones as they appear. 2. Cleaner comment topline for less distraction — shows controls only when you hover over the topline. There is a preview gif of how it looks in the README.
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 19TW
2017 · txtpen.com
- 20HB
I made a HN client that allows you to explore comments in a breadth-first manner. Compared to the classic depth-first approach, it works much better for the larger threads - you don't lose the context and can easily skip discussions you're not interested in. Video preview: https://imgur.com/a/tzBdpXw
2025 · apps.apple.com
- 21IP
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!…
Mar 2026 · cool-link-web-production.up.railway.app
- 22AN
Checking on some old material to provide some cross-referencing[1] I got this message: We've temporarily limited requests for old items. I've always taken it for granted that HN contained useful information that I'd be able to retrieve whenever I found the need, but this has brought me up short. Perhaps older discussions will eventually become unavailable. Will Google cache still have them? Will the Wayback machine still have them? How convenient will they be to find in the future. Probably this is a temporary glitch to prevent some overly enthusiastic crawler from bringing the site to a…
2012
- 23HI
Hi HN, Sharing HN Insights, a webapp I built that highlights trending themes and summarizes discussion threads from the front page. This started earlier this week as a toy project to test out Gemini 3 Pro in aistudio. I found the POC useful, so I decided to productionize it. I've included the original seed prompt below: > Create an app that creates a summary of the comment threads for hacker news front page. The UX should be similar, but clicking the comments instead opens a summary. The summary is generated when clicked so it can gather new threads. To productionize, I used Claude Code and…
Nov 2025 · hn-insights.com
- 24GL
Hi HN, I hacked a simple service for gathering HN replies and organizing them by the parent's username. The main idea is to be able to efficiently get the latest replies to an HN user. For example, you can use this service to send yourself notifications when some replies to you on HN. The service queries the official HN API and can be self-hosted. It is basically ~30 lines of Bash script. I made this mostly for educational purposes -- thought you might find it useful for something. Cheers! Edit: for example, here are the latest replies to me [0]. It includes only recent replies, since I…
2022 · github.com
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