Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Preview Your HN Post Before Posting (Because I Messed Up Mine)
Hey HN, I finally decided to stop lurking and posted on HN only to be discouraged by the confusing formatting rules. So I built a formatter https://hnpostformatter.blancotech.com. Some backstory. When I went to post, I discovered a mysterious formatting system not known to the regular person https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc. Simple, I thought. I'm sure there are like 50 formatters other patrons like me on HN built, that I can use to format before posting. I searched, and of course I found what I needed here.…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 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
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 →
- 3AT
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 →
- 4BH
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 · its alternatives →
- 5
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 · its alternatives →
- 6
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 →
- 7FH
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 →
- 8
Today's internet is filled with dopamine wells of content. I wanted to steer away from that and foster meaningful writing. So I made a site where you can only have a single post. The intention is to encourage thoughtful posts like the blogs we all love here at HN (Paul Graham's, fasterthanlime, Bartosz Ciechanowski's, etc). For now posts are only markdown, but I intend to make some markdown extensions to make posts more dynamic.
2022 · app.pressnt.net · its alternatives →
- 9IM
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 · its alternatives →
- 10SP
Hey, HN -- I just received the following email and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously I want to discourage requested-posting like this; is there some structured way that we can do that? One of the things I love about HN is how high the signal-to-noise ratio is relative to...pretty much the rest of the internet. I wouldn't ordinarily call someone out like this, but I want to innoculate HN against this sort of thing. ---- Hey doches, Not sure if it's conventional, but thought I'd ask anyway. Would you be open to posting about my product on Hacker News? I understand that similar to…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 11
This userscript adds archive URLs to the metadata section of HN submissions without breaking the immersion. Here are 2 screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/PdUu6oG GreasyFork: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/452024-hacker-news-anti-pa... Source code: https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall Now let me overexplain. -Why?- I never liked paywalled articles. I understand where they come from, but I don't like where we cross our paths. This is why I don't use major news aggregators anymore. Instead, I spend my…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12IA
Maybe you've had this experience too: You build something you're proud of, post it on HN with your low-karma account, and... crickets. Zero votes, zero comments. That's what happened to me last Monday. I posted my coding tool (XaresAICoder - an open-source browser IDE) that I'd built with AI assistance. In my mind it was revolutionary. On HN? Completely ignored. Then I wondered: How many other potentially great projects suffer the same fate? What "hidden gems" are we missing because they come from low-karma accounts? So I built hn-gems (with help from Claude and my own XaresAICoder). It…
2025 · hn-gems.sensem.de · its alternatives →
- 131H
2015 · 1po.st · its alternatives →
- 14AP
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…
2025 · hn.shaped.ai · its alternatives →
- 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 →
- 16HR
HNping lets you set a reminder for a HN post. You get a web push browser notification when it's time, and clicking it takes you back to the post. That's it. I built HNping because I kept stumbling on HN posts where the discussion still had to get going. Wanted to revisit, but didn't want to create even more bookmarks/etc I'll just forget about. So I created a 'remind me later' tool (like the reddit bot) to fix this for myself. To use it: go to hnping.com, enable notifications, and drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. Then click it on any HN post to set a reminder (5 minutes to 1…
2025 · hnping.com · its alternatives →
- 17UH
I've setup a bulletin board for the HN community that only accepts registrations from HN users. The idea behind it is to allow members of the community to have open discussions with each other that would otherwise be regarded as off topic. Any and all feedback welcome. http://hnbb.org
2012 · hnbb.org · its alternatives →
- 18
I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about. I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?" So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of…
Jan 2026 · hnsignals.com · its alternatives →
- 19RO
I was lucky enough to have my site trending on Friday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25872922). It’s an icon site that lists open source icons. I wanted to share some stats on the results after 3 days. Worth noting was that I submitted it on a Friday morning (at which point I went for a walk and a coffee; eek). - 24,997 page views. I (embarrassingly) didn’t have GA set up when I first submitted it, so this is probably missing a few hundred page views - 21 “feedback” emails (half of which were spam). I assume such a high percentage of these were spam because my Feedback…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 20FO
I've just launched a landing page for an ebook that I hope to have out sometime in June but I feel like that dog in the meme "I have no idea what I'm doing."[1] I am not a designer (or copywriter) but I've been hanging out on HN long enough to have a good idea where to go for help. I used Bootstrap[2] for a template, Colour Lovers[3] for a palette and Weebly's homepage[4] for inspiration. Weebly's homepage is fantastic but as much as I tried to keep it simple and powerful, like Weebly, I kept getting bogged down in massive amounts copy. I think this is probably where I need to most help.…
2012 · startupprivacy.com · its alternatives →
- 21SL
[1/2] Thursday evening (Mar 26) we made a soft launch for https://uidesigndaily.com (a UI website that I built for my wife) The goal was to get some feedback, fix bugs and get about 30-40 subscribers in the mailing list, to see how the newsletter performs. The launch went better than expected, and the feedback was generally positive. Below are some numbers for those interested. I posted it to 4 channels, IH, HN, Reddit and Twitter. It was best received on HN with 203 points, it made it in the top 10, and it stayed on the front page for a good while. Reddit also surprised me, I…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 22MS
linkrdr (www.linkrdr.com), a personal link aggregator, was directly inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555923 I read while browsing on HN. It's still a bit rough, but the concept is an interesting one and people have already shown interest. Let me know what you think. Also, if anyone knows a good UX designer, email me :)
2012 · its alternatives →
- 23AP
Hello! I’ve been reading Hacker News for years and have a bad habit of favoriting articles but never actually going back to read them. I finally built hnbuffer to scratch my own itch and help me work through that backlog. I also mainly built this as an excuse to learn/use some of the languages/frameworks/tools since I have another backlog of things I wanted to try too. It syncs your favorites into a queue with a reader mode and swipe gestures. The streak tracking is something I'm still experimenting with. Note: It requires an HN login to scrape the favorites list (credentials…
2013 · hnbuffer.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I loved this recent "Show and Tell" thread about side projects posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343 It inspired me to build a mini directory that aggregates over 500 side projects posted to HN since 2017. You can filter by year, category, or revenue level. Thank you Cursor + Next.js for making this insanely fun to build. Hopefully you discover hidden gems or find inspiration in what the HN community is creating. Happy browsing!
2024 · hnsideprojects.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- I built an interactive HN Simulator alternatives
- I asked an HN member for feedback and she blew my mind alternatives
- Analyzing top HN posts with language models alternatives
- Blogs.hn – tiny blog directory alternatives
- Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward Quality Comments alternatives
- Our weekend project - HN Showcase, browse "Show HN" posts alternatives
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 →