Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Second-Chance Pool
HN's second-chance pool is a way to give links a second chance at the front page. Moderators and a small number of reviewers go through old submissions looking for articles that are in the spirit of the site—gratifying intellectual curiosity—and which seem like they might interest the community. These get put into a hopper from which software randomly picks one every so often and lobs it randomly onto the lower part of the front page. If it interests the community, it gets upvoted and discussed; if not, it falls off. We started doing this in late 2014. There's an explanation at…
Second-Chance Pool is a system for Hacker News that resurfaces previously submitted articles that may have been overlooked. Moderators and reviewers curate older submissions aligned with the site's goal of gratifying… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Second-Chance Pool launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1AW
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 · its alternatives →
- 2WH
2015 · waybackhn.com · its alternatives →
- 3
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 →
- 4
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 →
- 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 →
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 7WI
2011 · hnpickup.appspot.com · its alternatives →
- 8IM
2013 · boredbanker.com · its alternatives →
- 9
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 →
- 10
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 · its alternatives →
- 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 →
- 12VT
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 · its alternatives →
- 13
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 →
- 14VT
2016 · timqian.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Contribute to archivy/archivy-hn development by creating an account on GitHub.
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
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 →
- 17IM
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 →
- 18
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 →
- 19EH
2016 · comments.network · its alternatives →
- 20
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 →
- 21
HN Deck: An alternate way to browse Hacker News
2020 · hndeck.sagunshrestha.com · its alternatives →
- 22AT
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 →
- 23FH
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 →
- 24HF
HN Follow lets you follow authors on Hacker News, and get email notifications when they post. It was inspired by alerthn.com and hnreplies.com. The app was built in an experimental style on Val Town. We’re trying to create a new web primitive that you can: 1. write like a function 2. run like a script 3. fork like a repo 4. install like an app This is our 5th iteration of this same “HN Follow” app. We launched the 3rd version here on Hacker News six months ago[1], but it was very kindly removed from the front page by dang in favor of us launching Val Town itself first, which we did in…
2023 · val.town · 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 →