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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Posts grew 6x since ChatGPT, but success rate remained relatively flat

Show HN submissions peaked at 6.3x their ChatGPT-launch level, while the number of successful submissions remained relatively flat.

This project analyzes trends in Show HN submissions on Hacker News, revealing that post volume surged to 6.3 times its level when ChatGPT launched, while the actual number of successful submissions remained relatively… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    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 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    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 →

  3. 3SH

    I analyzed 10 years of Hacker News data (2016-2025) to track Show HN submission trends. - Show HN posts went from ~900/month (2016-2019) to 3,315 in Dec 2025 - Share of all stories: 2.4% (2016) → 12.8% (Dec 2025) - Notable spikes: COVID-19 (2020), AI boom (2023), and accelerating growth through 2024-2025 Data source: HackerBook (144k Show HN posts / 3.4M total stories)

    Jan 2026 · imgur.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4SH
    Show HN▲1,302

    2014 · news.ycombinator.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5FY

    2016 · antontarasenko.github.io · its alternatives →

  6. 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. 7

    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 →

  8. 8

    I scraped every Show HN from the last 12 months (41,301 posts) plus the full comment tree of every launch with 10+ comments, ~100k comment timestamps, all from the Algolia HN API. The median launch gets 2 points and 0 comments. For launches that do get traction, half the comments they'll ever get arrive within 7.2 hours and 90% within 26, and the top decile decays on the same clock as everyone else. Vote timestamps aren't public, so comment timing is the attention proxy; caveats are in the post. Everything reproduces from the repo with one command…

    Jul 2026 · jonno.nz · its alternatives →

  9. 9HN

    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 · its alternatives →

  10. 10AT

    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 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Search 18 years of Hacker News and chart how any topic, tool, or person trended. Overlay terms to compare their rise and fall across 45M posts and comments.

    Jun 2026 · hackernewstrends.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12MH

    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 →

  13. 13HT
  14. 14FH

    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 →

  15. 15IB

    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 →

  16. 16SH

    This morning I've submitted our project to HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099054 Got pretty helpful feedback. But that wasn't the only thing. 478 people requested invite out of 755. 63% conversion rate. Almost 9K unique visitor visited our website. At some point in the morning I was seeing 400+ active users on the website. Unbelievable. 35 people registered without telling them how to register. ( You cannot register directly, there is only a login form - but they figured out a way :) http://imgur.com/Kbf9J 6K people visited directly from Hacker News, 1K from Twitter ( I guess…

    2012 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    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 · its alternatives →

  18. 18HA

    Hey there HN! I wanted to share a pet project of mine. I built HackYourNews [1] to scratch a personal itch: Knowing which stories to focus on while browsing aimlessly (though there is a certain joy in that, as well!) HackYourNews uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to summarize the destination article as well as the comments section. Summarization of the article is always cached, while summaries of the comments are regenerated if the comments count is >10% (or >10 comments) different. While I styled the homepage to welcome HNers, my preferred view is the Mobile view, accessed from the navbar. This…

    2023 · hackyournews.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Fifteen years of Show HN: the thirty-four repeat fliers and the top ten of every year. Volume 2 of 2.

    Sep 2026 · artifactbin.dev · its alternatives →

  20. 20HN

    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 · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Discover standout projects launched on Hacker News Show HN from 2008 to 2026, organized by date, topic, and Y Combinator batch.

    2019 · bestofshowhn.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    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 →

  23. 23

    http://www.hnshowcase.com Moses (nnythm) and I browse Hacker News daily. Show HN posts are some of our favorite parts of HN. We wanted to create a way to browse Show HN articles, even those that might not quite make it to the front page. We created http://www.hnshowcase.com last weekend to make discovering projects posted on HN easier. It searches all "Show HN" posts and generates a thumbnail view for each of them. You can sort by submission date, points, and number of comments, and navigate with left/right or j/k keys. We used the following technologies: HN Search API, Pyramid web…

    2011 · hnshowcase.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Show HN posts per month more than doubled in the last year

    Jan 2026 · petegoldsmith.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 →