Alternatives
Products that do what Popularity Contest, the highest-ranking personal blogs of HN does
Personal blogs are my favorite part of Hacker News, so I was curious to find out which ones are the most popular. There are tools for finding popular individual posts on HN, but I'd never found anything that aggregates scores across multiple submissions for the same domain, so I decided to build one. I also had a vain curiosity about how my own blog compared to other popular HN authors like Simon Willison and Dan Luu. I had fun making this, as it helped me discover a lot of high-quality personal blogs that weren't on my radar, especially from the earlier days of HN. Suggestions, questions,…
- 1HN
I saw this [0] pretty cool thread by user revskill, and wanted a quicker way to search through it, but also to keep them all in one place so I can read them at my leisure whenever I get time. Right now is like 60 lines of Ruby using Nokogiri, but I will certainly look into it further down the line and improve the list. There's a cronjob checking the thread every 12 hours but I will eventually shut that down and it will become static after that. There are some really awesome blogs in there. I really recommend going through the list, it made my day. [0] "Could you share your personal blog…
2023 · dm.hn
- 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
- 3MR
Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…
2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me
- 4AT
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
- 5HH
TLDR: Build a quick HN profile to see how little context LLMs need to personalise your feed. Rate 30 posts once, get a permanent ranked homepage you can return to. Our goal was to build a tool that allowed us to test a range of "personal contexts" on a very focused everyday use case for us, reading HN! We are exploring use of personal context with LLMs, specifically what kind of data, how much, and with how much additional effort on the user’s part was needed to get decent results. The test tool was a bit of fun on its own so we re-skinned it and decided to post it here. First time posting…
2025 · hackernews.coffee
- 6HN
I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
2024 · hn.moritz.pm
- 7AW
I submitted a link, when someone clicks on it I get an up-vote for this article. I don't want people to misuse this I just want to bring attention to this problem. This is the link I used that up-votes this: http://news.ycombinator.com/vote?for=3742742&dir=up&...
2012
- 8FH
Hey HN. I created this website. https://pj4533.com/hn-overlooked/ It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this. I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I…
2025 · pj4533.com
- 9IB
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
- 10AP
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…
Sep 2025 · hn.shaped.ai
- 11IM
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
- 12FH
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
- 13SH
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
- 14HN
The use of the em dash (—) now raises suspicions that a text might have been AI-generated. Inspired by a suggestion from dang [1], I created a leaderboard of HN users according to how many of their posts before November 30, 2022—that is, before the release of ChatGPT—contained em dashes. Dang himself comes in number 2—by a very slim margin. Credit to Claude Code for showing me how to search the HN database through Google BigQuery and for writing the HTML for the leaderboard. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933
2025 · gally.net
- 15VT
Hi HN. I was surprised that there wasn't a feature here that lets you go back in time to the front page of Hacker News on a random day...so I made one. http://randomhackernews.com is a simple HTML page that navigates you to the front page of HN on a random day between today and February 19, 2007 (the oldest date I could find with content). I made this for myself, but figured others may find some interest in it.
2024 · randomhackernews.com
- 16
- 17HR
Hey guys, I just flicked the switch on http://hnrecap.com and thought I would make a tiny announcement! The site was created for a simple reason: There is a big rotation of articles on the front page of Hacker News every day, and unless you are on here 24/7, you are bound to miss some great content and discussions. I was tired of this and the rss feed doesn't cut it for me since it doesn't preserve ranking information over time. On HN Recap, rankings are somewhat preserved: Every 2 minutes, I request the HN front page, update articles and attribute points in the following simple fashion: #1…
2010
- 18IW
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
- 19BH
Like others on here, I was inspired by the "personal blogs" post :) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 In proper HN fashion, the site is open-source and requires no JS! There's instructions on how to add/edit a blog on the Github README. [1] https://github.com/surprisetalk/blogs.hn Note that your blog might appear in blogs.json, but not on the site! Right now I'm using the following code to filter out blogs. Your blog might appear if you add more metadata: if ( 3 > 0 + !!blog.title + (blog.desc.length > 40) + !!blog.about + !!blog.now +…
2023 · blogs.hn
- 20QN
Hello HN! TLDR; - Quality News is a Hacker News client that provides additional data and insights on submissions, notably, the upvoteRate metric. - We propose that this metric could be used to improve the Hacker News ranking score. - In-depth explanation: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme The Hacker News ranking score is directly proportional to upvotes, which is a problem because it creates a feedback loop: higher rank leads to more upvotes leads to higher rank, and so on... → ↗ ↘ Higher Rank More Upvotes ↖ ↙ ← As a consequence, success on HN depends almost…
2023 · news.social-protocols.org
- 21HN
Hi folks, I've built an alternative Hacker News front page. It is inspired by and meant to be a replacement for hckrnews.com. I built this because HN is woefully underfeatured, but most sites that try to improve it seem to assume that the visual design is the problem. hcker.news tries to maintain HN's familiarity while adding useful enhancements. There are three primary views: - Timeline View: Browse top stories by votes or comments grouped by day, week, or month (e.g., top 20 per day, top 100 per week). - Aggregate View: See top stories by votes or comments over custom time ranges. - Front…
2025 · hcker.news
- 22IB
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
- 23HB
Hey guys, I love HN! I wanted to extend the same aesthetic and community towards things beyond tech-related news. I thought it would be cool to get the same quality of community gathered around the latest and greatest research coming out. Let me know what you guys think of what I have so far. It's still early so there are probably bugs and other quality issues. If there's any features missing that you'd want let me know. ALSO, if any of you are familiar with the map of the territory of any particular field, please let me know! Would love to pick your brain and to come up with a 'most…
2024 · papertalk.xyz
- 24IM
I noticed the who's hiring threads are very popular every month, so I decided to create a job board specifically for hacker news. You can tag jobs, search, view user's profiles and more. Tell me what you guys thing! Any feedback is appreciated.
2013 · hnjobs.org
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