Alternatives
Products that do what Send private messages to anyone on HN does
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…
- 1IB
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
- 2MH
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
- 3PM
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…
2024 · hn-pm.me
- 4LW
2022 · loginwithhn.com
- 5FH
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
- 6CW
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
- 7MH
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
- 8GL
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
- 92G
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
- 10
- 11HF
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
- 12HW
I was looking for some fun project to play around with the latest Gemini models and ended up building this :) Enter your username and get: - Generated roasts and stats based on your HN activity 2025 - Your personalized HN front page from 2035 (inspired by a recent Show HN [0]) - An xkcd-style comic of your HN persona It uses the latest gemini-3-flash and gemini-3-pro-image (nano banana pro) models, which deliver pretty impressive and funny results. A few examples: - dang: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang - myself: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo Give…
Dec 2025 · hn-wrapped.kadoa.com
- 13AW
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
- 14HH
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
- 15ZA
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
- 16HC
2016 · hnchat.com
- 17
- 18QAQ&A for HN users▲142
2012 · askolo.com
- 19HR
2016 · hnreplies.com
- 20CI
2016 · clap.chat
- 21HF
2014 · hn-follow.desh.es
- 22AH
I wrote a small Chrome extension that allows the user to replace all usernames on Hacker News with either the string `anonymous` or a deterministic hashed value.
2023 · chrome.google.com
- 23HG
2018 · hnnotify.xyz
- 24CW
2012 · rabblr.com
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