Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Similar user search for Hacker News
features: 1. find similar users 2. similarity and dissimilarity search for comments 3. Browse user comments from oldest first 4. Flattened comments in reverse chronological order on stories 5. Find similar stories Self hosted on a single machine. Probably not ready, but oh well… Instructions for free trial: (create account -> confirm email -> request free trial from profile page). Or download ios app: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/hacker-read/id6479697844
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Similar user search for Hacker News launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1US
Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do. Here's Paul Graham:…
2022 · stylometry.net · its alternatives →
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 3

- 4

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 →
- 5HA
Hey there HN! I wanted to share a pet project of mine. I built HackYourNews [1] to scratch a personal itch: Knowing which stories to focus on while browsing aimlessly (though there is a certain joy in that, as well!) HackYourNews uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to summarize the destination article as well as the comments section. Summarization of the article is always cached, while summaries of the comments are regenerated if the comments count is >10% (or >10 comments) different. While I styled the homepage to welcome HNers, my preferred view is the Mobile view, accessed from the navbar. This…
2023 · hackyournews.com · its alternatives →
- 6One App▲182
Read Product Hunt, Hacker News, DN & Reddit in one place
2015 · reader.one · its alternatives →
- 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

Search trough and subscribe to Hacker News
2018 · whoishiring.me · its alternatives →
- 9

macOS HackerNews client that aims to be a Mac-assed Mac app. Written in Swift + AppKit. - goranmoomin/HackerNews
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10

- 11HC
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 →
- 12

Hi HN! I'm Jonathan and I built Hacker Search (https://hackersearch.net), a semantic search engine for Hacker News. Type a keyword or a description of what you're interested in, and you'll get top links from HN surfaced to you along with brief summaries. Unlike HN's otherwise very valuable search feature, Hacker Search doesn't require you to get your keywords exactly right. That's achieved by leveraging OpenAI's latest embedding models alongside more traditional indexes extracted from the scraped and cleaned up contents of the links. I think there are many more interesting things…
2024 · hackersearch.net · its alternatives →
- 13AA
For example, paste this into Slack or Discord or whatever: https://news.ycombinator1.com/item?id=30179549 It works with comments, too: https://news.ycombinator1.com/item?id=30180253 Hastily-developed source: https://github.com/statico/ycombinator1.com
2022 · its alternatives →
- 14

- 15
TL;DR▲199I 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 →
- 16DT
Magnet link: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:44c65b5779d9d8021e002584fa73740f36d052a6&dn=10m_hn_comments_sorted Go to https://hn-archive.appspot.com/ for the torrent file / source code. I'll be semi-frequently checking the story and answering any questions which may come up.
2015 · its alternatives →
- 17

I create a free HackerNews reader App for iPhone/iPod touch. I have worked really hard 2 months. You can vote / reply the news. I appreciate any feedback, any reviews to me. Thanks very very much. You can download it from: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackernews+-free/id490595576?mt=8 You can download it from: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackernews+-free/id490595576?mt=8
2012 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 18

Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read). Main website: https://hackersmacker.org Chrome/Edge extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg... Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725 Firefox extension:…
Feb 2026 · hackersmacker.org · its alternatives →
- 19

iOS Hacker News client to not get lost in big discussions
2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 20

Download HACK for Hacker News YC Reader by Pranoy Chowdhury on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more apps like HACK for…
2019 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 21SH
I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…
2024 · searchhacker.news · its alternatives →
- 22

- 23HN
Since I got an iPad I was looking for a better Hacker News reading experience than the one you can get using the web version. On the iPhone I use the ihackernews.com web app (and soon going to try news.yc). It's decent for the iPhone, but it doesn't scale good on the iPad. To my surprise, when I checked there was no decent iPad app for HN (i.e. lacking ability to comment or vote, no readability support and more). I anyway wanted to give a try to iPad development, and was looking for an interesting project to work on. Making HN reader app seemed as a good candidate. Over the last weekend I…
2011 · bit.ly · its alternatives →
- 24

Download HACK for Hacker News YC Reader by Pranoy Chowdhury on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips and more apps like HACK for Hacker…
2020 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts alternatives
- Meet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city alternatives
- Hacker Feed alternatives
- I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript alternatives
- HackYourNews – AI summaries of the top HN stories alternatives
- One App 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 →