Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Private Messages for Hacker News Users
Hello HN, motivated by meet.hn[1], i've built hn-pm.me, a platform just for Hacker News users to exchange direkt messages. (There is no official relation between my site and HN) My main motivation were two users talking about that some meet.hn users didn't provide any means of contact information. Maybe they didn't want to be contacted, maybe they didn't want to share any of their social media profiles. That's why i built hn-pm.me, where you can register only with your HN username and _a_ password (not your HN password!) and start receiving messages from other HN users. Passwords are safely…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Private Messages for Hacker News Users launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1MH
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 →
- 2
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 →
- 3HC
2016 · hnchat.com · its alternatives →
- 4SHShow HN▲1,302
2014 · news.ycombinator.com · its alternatives →
- 5
(Unofficial) Login with HackerNews
2022 · loginwithhn.com · its alternatives →
- 6SP
https://fro.app This is an experimental app that I've been working on. I wanted to send a direct private message to someone on HN (similar to what they have on Reddit). - You create an account - You connect your HN account (by inserting a code on your HN about) - You type HN username and send a message - The message will be "received" once the other person also connects their HN account. Some built-in rules - Send up to 5 messages within 24 hour period. - If you get flagged as SPAM more than twice within 24 hour period, you won't be able to send a message for the next 24 hours. I'm…
2022 · 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 →
- 8HC
There's been lots of discussion recently about finding other HNers to talk to / bounce ideas off / work with, some Google spreadsheets were set up to share details but they were soon vandalised. I had a spare afternoon yesterday (which turned into a long day) and here's the result: http://www.hackernewsers.com/ It's only open to people with HN accounts, it lets you post your biography, location, skills etc. Anyway, I hope you like it and find it useful.
2010 · hackernewsers.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Community, All the HN belong to you. This is an archive of hacker news that fits in your browser. When I made HN Made of Primes I realized I could probably do this offline sqlite/wasm thing with the whole GBs of archive. The whole dataset. So I tried it, and this is it. Have Hacker News on your device. Go to this repo (https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook): you can download it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's…
Dec 2025 · hackerbook.dosaygo.com · its alternatives →
- 10HR
2016 · hnreplies.com · its alternatives →
- 11QAQ&A for HN users▲142
2012 · askolo.com · its alternatives →
- 12
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 →
- 13CI
2016 · clap.chat · its alternatives →
- 14MH
Very opportunistic toy project as I saw the domain was up for grabs: 'at.hn' is a little site where people can have their own subdomains for whatever their HN username is (opt-in only by adding a slug to your bio). It doesn't really do much. Just shows your HN bio rendered as markdown plus meta stuff. I'm thinking of adding an aggregated user listing on the homepage so people can explore profiles. There's a bunch of interesting people on HN but discoverability is a bit longwinded. I'm wondering what other features people want. Otherwise shall likely leave it as-is. I remember hnbadges was a…
2024 · at.hn · its alternatives →
- 15IM
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 →
- 16
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 →
- 17
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 →
- 18
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 →
- 19
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 · its alternatives →
- 20AD
We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…
2024 · hn.trieve.ai · its alternatives →
- 21
Hi HN, I hacked a simple service for gathering HN replies and organizing them by the parent's username. The main idea is to be able to efficiently get the latest replies to an HN user. For example, you can use this service to send yourself notifications when some replies to you on HN. The service queries the official HN API and can be self-hosted. It is basically ~30 lines of Bash script. I made this mostly for educational purposes -- thought you might find it useful for something. Cheers! Edit: for example, here are the latest replies to me [0]. It includes only recent replies, since I…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22FC
Hi HN community! A huge number of startup founders are reading Hacker News, but it's still very hard to make new personal connections here and help each other with product building, growth, or fundraising. As an experiment to make HN founder community more connected, I've created a system of chat groups, organized by location, industry sector, and priority tasks. We were testing it out for the last couple of weeks, starting with 200+ YCombinator alum companies. Now already have 1000+ startups there, and 80+ venture investors have joined to connect with founders early. Many pitch practices…
2019 · its alternatives →
- 23
Brought to you by Porkbun.
2012 · rabblr.com · its alternatives →
- 24
HN+▲92Launch your very own HackerNews clone & grow your community
2023 · hn.plus · its alternatives →
Also compare
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 →