nowfound

Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

RO

24 alternatives to Retrospective on having my “Show HN” on the front-page

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…

This is a retrospective post about an icon site that lists open source icons and its performance after trending on Hacker News. The maker shares statistics from three days following the launch, including nearly 25,000… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Retrospective on having my “Show HN” on the front-page launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    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 →

  2. 2HN

    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 →

  3. 3

    I figured, "what better way to look at a list of (hopefully) inspiring projects?" The upvotes work and are globally synced.

    2024 · guycombinator.net · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    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 →

  5. 5IB

    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 →

  6. 6AT

    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 →

  7. 7

    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 →

  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. 9
    TL;DR▲199

    I love Hacker News but I rarely have time to read full articles / comments, so I built a simple site to summarize the top posts & comments to make it easier to get a big picture. A few implementation details: - It pulls the top stories from the HN Firebase API (`/v0/topstories`) - Filters stories with >200 points - Uses Claude Sonnet for post + comment summaries - Tries to capture the sentiment of the comments (still working on improving this) - Refreshes both posts + summaries hourly It has already helped me I hope it helps you! Please let me know if you have any feedback --…

    2025 · tl-dr.tv · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    upvotetracker adalah situs berita yang menyajikan laporan terbaru dari berbagai topik dengan analisis yang cepat, jelas, dan mudah diikuti pembaca.

    2021 · upvotetracker.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11FH

    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 · its alternatives →

  12. 12FY

    2016 · antontarasenko.github.io · its alternatives →

  13. 13

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

    Aug 2026 · orangecrumbs.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14SH

    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 →

  15. 15SL

    [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 →

  16. 16

    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 →

  17. 17

    Hey HN, We analyzed 4,010,957 Hacker News submissions to find what actually makes posts perform well. Key findings: - 93.2% of posts never hit 50 points - Top 1% starts at 270 points - Certain keywords boost engagement by 1000%+ Built a free tool that scores your launch title and predicts viral potential: [link] The entire 4M post dataset is available as a single 700MB .mv2 file if you want to run your own analysis.

    Dec 2025 · hn-ph.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  18. 18TS

    Some interesting posts/comments. Meteor (April 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824908 Codecademy (August 2011) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2901156 Kimono Labs (Jan 2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7066479 Firebase (April 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877 Dropbox (April 2007) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 Watsi (August 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081 Heap Analytics (March 2013)…

    2014 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    2 months ago I launched a service that sends email alerts when you get a new comment/reply on Hacker News. I've only been able to acquire 6 users since releasing it (°ー°〃) I tried promoting it here (duuh), Reddit, and LinkedIn. Optimized it for SEO (ranking 3rd on my target keywords). All with limited success. So I've decided to open-source it! Links to... - frontend: https://github.com/mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-fronten... - backend: https://github.com/mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-backend I'm still using it for myself, since there's…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Last Wednesday (Jan 29th) I made a ‘Show HN’ post on Hacker News for Dictionary Domains. Seems it struck a chord; the post remained on the front page for the entire day! I thought it’d be interesting to write a recap of (1) the traffic that came in, (2) the number of domains bought

    2014 · blog.justinthiele.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    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,…

    2025 · refactoringenglish.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22AP

    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 →

  23. 23

    This was submitted about 9 months ago as a Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605493), people was generally favorable to it, but I never got around to do anything else with it past the first few days. I recently rescued a Github account I had, so I'm putting the source of the Rails app over there in case anyone wanted to do anything with it. The site still runs on https://dm.hn Generates about 2 to 3 GB bandwidth usage every month, and the blogs are still checked every day for new content. I must say, I still visit every week and find interesting entries…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    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 →

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 →