Alternatives
Products that do what New project for on-demand chat rooms does
I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
- 1HN
I'm Seth, creator of discourse.fm, a browser-based tool/platform to create live audio chat rooms. I just launched an extension of the site - https://hackernews.discourse.fm/ - which pulls stories in real-time from the HN site using the public API, and enables anyone to join a live audio discussion about the story (think Clubhouse rooms autogenerated for HN stories). Once you enter a room, you can grab the link generated for a room and paste it back to the comments on the HN story to invite more participants. hackernews.discourse.fm is both a full-fledged product and a…
2021
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- 4IL
Hello HN, I want to share something that I worked on for quite a while as my side project - www.heahy.com an IRC like chat where you can share various media and even record yourself (using web MediaRecorder api). Here is a thread with short explanation on how it works: https://www.heahy.com/channel/homepage/thread/3900adb9e441a09abc757461 I am looking for any feedback and if you have any ideas, advice or questions I am eager to hear it here or on heahy!
2020
- 5SO
Hey HN, My co-founders and I have been working on a project for the last month or so, and we'd like to get your input on it. We wanted to hear your thoughts on what we're doing - so check out our landing page, and let us know what you think/understand. Does it sounds like something you guys would want to use? http://www.thesharedweb.com/alpha/intro We'll tell you guys more about exactly what we're doing as the conversation evolves, but we just wanted to see what the initial reaction is, and what you understand (i.e. are we describing it in a way that makes sense). Really excited to hear your…
2010 · thesharedweb.com
- 6HA
Hello HN! Here's my November Startup Sprint project (coded in two days). http://hackerlunch.com It allows you to post your lunch plans and lets other hackers join you. I built this because I often see HN users are interested in meeting each other if they are in the same area. I am not a coder, so this version is very rough. If people use it, I will work with others to build a more polished version. I would love some feedback. What do you think? Is this something you will be using?
2010
- 7FI
This is something fun I’ve been hacking on recently: ridiculously simple group chat. Go to http://faces.io and then get your friends to do the same. That’s it! :-D Currently works best in Chrome. It’s definitely beta status at best. Audio can get weird—be ready to mute. ;-) Let me know what you think!
2014
- 8HN
I recently received access to develop and use ChatGPT plugins, and embarked on a project to build a Hacker News integration as a learning exercise. My goal was to enable retrieval of content from HN to answer questions and produce insights in conversations with ChatGPT. I documented my journey in this blog post, which will hopefully be helpful to other plugin developers or anyone looking to learn more about embeddings. You can try the experience even if you don't have plugin access on ChatGPT through the demo on hn.kix.in - it's a loose approximation but should give you a sense of what's…
2023 · kix.in
- 9MW
I always find myself frustrated by how many steps I have to take to video chat with someone online. There's always too much software to download and install, and too many accounts to remember. The high-end, high-price Cisco conferencing systems I've used are especially fragile. So I built Vidless in a weekend for myself, and I hope you find it useful too. Just create a room and share the link, and you'll be chatting in seconds. You can invite several people (I haven't really tested a max yet), and chats on Vidless are always private. Enjoy!
2012 · vidless.com
- 10MF
Please have a look at www.socialeaks.com and tell me what you think. This is my first adventure in coding (my background is not CS). I started learning rails about a month ago via railstutorial.org. When I finished that, I felt the best way to continue learning would be to just build an app from scratch. I came up with this concept while observing how crazy the world had gone over WikiLeaks. I thought this was a funny idea. I also thought it would be fun to build! So, here I am. I built this in rails 3 and it is currently living on Heroku. It took me about two weeks to code, doing just about…
2011
- 11HC
I built HackerBuddy.com with the idea of helping the Hacker News community get one-on-one help with fellow hackers that know their stuff. It matches up people that are good at a particular skill (Ruby on Rails, Python, beta-testing, general startup advice etc) with people that need that specialist help. All it does is swap your email address so that hackers can give fellow hackers one-on-one advice. I built the site as a way to learn Ruby on Rails, I'm still a bit green when it comes to coding so there's a very good chance that the server will fall over. Any feedback you guys have would be…
2011
- 12AM
TLDR: I built a "quick and dirty " private social network for my friends, posted on Reddit and HN, got some interest so now have built it properly along with my brother. site link: https://intimost.com/login/ demo creds: [email protected] Demo123! Full version: I needed a social network where I can just send updates and nothing else. So I built it, my friends liked and now I have built it "for the world". Everything is private by default. - Text-only updates - No likes. Only views to acknowledge a post - [in development] Comments are private between the poster and…
Oct 2025
- 13OC
Hey everyone! I built a little side project called OpenQuest over the last three weeks, and I'm looking for some feedback to see if it's worth taking further. The idea is simple: it's a place to create a chat room where you can connect with people (a maximum of 8) who have the same goal as you, for a short time (7 days for now). Think of it as a way to stay motivated, hold each other accountable, or simply work together with new people on something specific. Some examples can be: - Following a programming course - Reading a book - Getting back to the gym - Cleaning up your home - Shopping…
2024 · openquest.app
- 14CS
I have just launched a project that has been sitting on my hard drive 80% finished for the better part of a year. http://www.chatroulettespy.com It detects your 'anonymous' chat partner's IP address and performs a geolocation lookup on it to show the user the partner's approximate location on a map. I know the Chatroulette fad has peaked a long time ago (when I started this project), but there are still many people using it and its many clones. It was important for me to follow through on this one and not let it die on my hard drive like many projects before. I would appreciate any feedback…
2011
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2018 · shoutbox.gq
- 16TA
Hi HN, For years I’ve missed the feeling of an always-on chatroom without the silos and social overhead of Discord. So I built Together: a single-room, no-signup group chat that you join with one click. No channels, no rules (yet), no onboarding flow. Everyone lands in the same place and can start talking in under a second. Why I made it - Forums and blog comments are great but slow; Discord/Slack feel heavy for casual drop-ins if you aren’t already a member of a community. - I wanted the simplest possible space where ~100 people could idle, share shower thoughts, and keep the…
Oct 2025 · together.lol
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Hey everyone, ChatGPT recently added a very small but powerful feature - the ability to share your chats! I think it’s a great way to create prototypes and share them, here are a couple of examples: First, [a small talk simulator](https://chat.openai.com/share/1329d8ec-5141-45f9-a2c2-842d4bad7bcc) a game to help you improve your social skills. Second, [a shark tank simulator](https://chat.openai.com/share/48155efe-101b-4662-b41e-c13aa909f017), see if your idea and pitch can get a deal on ABCs hit show! [Here’s my…
2023
- 18GS
This weekend I finally shipped Gryt, a project I’ve been building since 2022 — an open-source, self-hostable Discord-style app focused on reliable voice chat + text. I’m the creator. I started it after getting fed up with Discord disconnects/paywalls and wanted something self-hosted and auditable. I started on this in 2022 and had an early proof-of-concept working back then (auth + friends list), but I quickly realized WebRTC voice isn’t something you can duct-tape together. I spent a big chunk of the next couple years learning the stack (ICE/DTLS-SRTP, NAT traversal, SFU design),…
Feb 2026 · gryt.chat
- 19PM
Hello HN, I just launched presbot.com Presbot makes it really easy to create a professional grade chatbot. There’s no code to write, workflows to build, is office appropriate, has community features (likes, connections, private messages), ability to track views, chat transcripts and more, plus is totally free. You can personalize the look and feel of your chatbot, train it with prescribed questions, add your own questions and share its link on your resume. It can answer questions on your behalf when you’re not reachable or busy. Think of it as a super scaled down interactive version of…
2020
- 20CC
Hey there HN! I believe the future of AI communication will be more voice and less text. Low-latency realistic voice interactions are finally becoming feasible. I've built a few voice-first apps on Retell AI using Elevenlabs voices. This one uses Claude Haiku for responses and Mixtral to switch between posts and comments. The AI knows about the top 30 posts and their comments on Hacker News right now. After a Google sign-in you can try it free for 10 minutes. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
2024 · callhackernews.com
- 21CM
This is a userscript that you can use with Tampermonkey, or paste it to JS console. I generated it with o1-preview, simply by pasting the HTML source of a HN page to the prompt and asking it to make a comment updating script. And it worked flawlessly — great job, OpenAI! I'm impressed. What a time to be alive! The prompt: https://chatgpt.com/share/66eb36c5-a55c-8005-9ee1-d42770297d... The script fetches new comments every 10 seconds and inserts them to a proper place in the DOM, highlighting them with a nice color. With this script, HN feels like a realtime chat in busy…
2024 · gist.github.com
- 22WM
Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…
2014
- 23WO
Hey guys, I am think of building an open-source version of Perplexity to let devs play around with it. But with all the existing tools available what features would you want? Anything specific? What is missing? Currently working on - 1. Streaming text 2. Citations sources 3. Image and file upload 4. Chat history and storage 5. Temperature and custom instructions If you are in marketing or growth can anyone help me with what to focus on while building such an app? Also here is a very first version. Probably will break and most of the buttons also don’t work, built it in 3 days using Bing and…
2024 · omniplex.vercel.app
- 24IB
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
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