Alternatives
Products that do what Old News – News that gets better the *less* you read it does
I’ve always wanted a news app designed for people who don’t stay up-to-date daily. That pays attention to when I check-in and what stories I’m aware of and adapts to me. You see, I’m not a good “follower” of the news, and I “catch-up” fairly infrequently. When I do, I want to see the most important things I’ve missed in the meantime, not today’s top stories. I’d like to emerge from my metaphorical cave after a week, a month, or longer, and quickly see what I missed. That’s Old News. I built it for myself, but if you’re like me (statistically, you probably aren’t!) you may like it too. It is…
- 1FN
This started as a reaction to a conversational trope. Despite being a tranquil place, even conversations at my yoga studio often start with, "Can you believe what's going on right now?" with that angry/scared undertone. I'm a news avoider, so I usually feel some smug self-satisfaction in those instances, but I wondered if there was a way to satisfy the urge to doomscroll without the anxiety. My hypothesis: Apply a 40-year latency buffer. You get the intellectual stimulation of "Big Events" without the fog of war, because you know the world didn't end. 40 years creates a mirror between…
Nov 2025 · forty.news
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7TL
I built this app because I really enjoyed "Pulse" but I felt it lacked a few things. I wanted a web-based version, I wanted my news articles grouped together by topic, and I wanted an easy way to share with other people. It is early in the site's life, so somethings are missing, including the critical mobile app. If you have any feedback to give, it would be appreciated!
2011 · thread.ly
- 8TA
I got fed up with the news reader apps out there so I decided to make my own. Its a simple concept where it tracks all your favorite news sources for new posts and the social shares it received. Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes. It's not meant to be alternative to HN, just a focused way to track your favorite sources. Please try it out and let me know what do you think, http://telescope.surf/ Note: you can do 'Add to Homescreen' on mobile to make it as an app. Please leave a feedback or any feature wishlist you may have. Thanks!
2017
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13TN
I made this for when I come back from vacation and want to catch up on news. It's a bit of a simplistic LLM transformation on headlines and URLs that I store from RSS feeds. So it bugs out sometimes. But I think it might be useful to me. You can check out some of the prompts in the "debug" links. What do you think?
2025 · ubershmekel.github.io
- 14IN
I noticed I was getting side tracked reading Hacker News, checking back, reading articles, comments, etc. It felt like my productivity was being hampered so I created a simple web app to receive the most popular stories in a daily email. http://dailyhn.com
2011
- 15
- 16AN
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
- 17IM
Hey HN, the full story is on the page, but here's the TL;DR: I'm 35 and somewhere along the way I lost the ability to finish reading articles. I'd open them, read 2-3 paragraphs, get distracted, and close the tab feeling like a failure. My "Read Later" list became a graveyard of 2,000+ unread articles. I tried everything – focus apps, reader modes, blocking extensions. Nothing worked. Then I realized. 'maybe the problem isn't me'. Modern web articles are designed for engagement metrics, not comprehension. Sidebars, popups, related articles, comment sections – everything is optimized to pull…
Jan 2026 · parsely.obasic.app
- 18RM
http://newspo.st/dev-preview.html I'd like to hear some feedback about this App I've been working on lately. It's exactly what everyone tells you not to do: a "news app", but I strongly believe this one is different: News are ranked by real-time Twitter popularity, you can see what people says on Twitter about a specific topic and you can download full articles as well. I think personalization narrows the scope of articles you can come across, while sometimes it's good to read about stuff that matters to everyone. The first raw version of the app is now available on iTunes. If…
2013
- 19LT
I struggle with wanting to read heaps of stuff I come across on the internet daily, as well as being subscribed to a bunch of tech-related newsletters that I never get around to reading. I made this to get through that content much faster while working or otherwise multitasking. Check it out and please lmk your thoughts! Also, curious if others also feel this pain of too much interesting content to get through daily. FWIW I probably listen to this for >1 hour daily atm.
2024 · lavalamp.ai
- 20IB
Hi HN! I built a proof of concept 'newspaper' that creates short news articles of today's current events with GPT. This is a very rough proof of concept but I can't help but think this concept is the future. I think we'll all have AI daily newspapers in whatever theme we want, covering any amount of information we want, with the ability to expand or contract article length instantly. Sharing just to get everyone thinking about this future. Thanks for reading!
2023 · thegordonpost.com
- 21HN
Since I got an iPad I was looking for a better Hacker News reading experience than the one you can get using the web version. On the iPhone I use the ihackernews.com web app (and soon going to try news.yc). It's decent for the iPhone, but it doesn't scale good on the iPad. To my surprise, when I checked there was no decent iPad app for HN (i.e. lacking ability to comment or vote, no readability support and more). I anyway wanted to give a try to iPad development, and was looking for an interesting project to work on. Making HN reader app seemed as a good candidate. Over the last weekend I…
2011
- 22TL
Hi everyone, My name is Stuart and I've been solo developing a news app (and now newsletter) for the past half a year or so. tl;dr (current status): an app with a Twitter like feed of news events. The posts are 1-2 sentences, only actual events (no opinion, analysis, roundup, evergreen, etc), categorized into feeds, and tagged (lets you dig wikis or find events for a given entity). There is also a newsletter I just launched that is a bit cleaner in terms of UI, but with less features. longer: My goal is to make it easier to stay informed and access information (not such a hot take that news…
2022 · airvue.news
- 23
- 24NR
I'd love any comments, suggestions or critiques on Newsfeedy (www.newsfeedy.com). It gathers trending topics from Twitter and Google and fetches news stories about them, and displays supplementary info from Twitter and Reddit. I originally created it for myself as a way to quickly catch up on breaking news, and a friend suggested it might be useful for others too. I know it's not groundbreaking, it's just a simple tool that saves 3 seconds of your life. And yes, I know that it's not very shiny. Thanks!
2011
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →