Alternatives
Products that do what thejohn.life does
Burst your social bubble with a random story
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I began this in late September purely on the whims of frustration with thesaurus.com, which does not bother to focus the input box! So I made my own site that focuses the input box. And because I wanted a thesaurus where I could type just the term in the address bar (eg type carefulwords.com/word) to get my results. It is very rough around the edges right now. There are far too many synonyms, which themselves are only organized alphabetically. I hope to take the site in a more inspiring direction over time than merely synonyms. Perhaps euphemisms, or other poetic uses from the past, or…
2022 · carefulwords.com
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2013 · github.com
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I’ve long thought that the Word of the Day was a wasted genre. The goal should be to give you words you can use; to enrich your understanding of words you already know; or at least to use words to tell you something neat about the world. Instead, what you usually get is words that will never be used in conversation, held up as curios. Some examples from Dictionary.com’s daily email: thewless, balladmonger, vagility, contextomy. These words are... not useful. I’ve always thought I could do better. My friend Ben recently created a daily puzzle game, called Bracket City, launched here on HN…
2025
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Bringing ‘A Brief History of Time’ to a whole new generation
2016
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for decades, i have been concerned that the internet was being built around non-fiction, so i built something to show how we could celebrate great fiction on the web. i started with an amazing library from the public domain, and i also added tools to add your own stories super interested to hear any feedback, and if you read anything good!
Jul 2026 · tale.fyi
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I built Yourabbit.com — a site that curates hand-picked YouTube rabbit holes grouped by themes like quirky psychology, obscure tech, weird facts, and binge-worthy oddities. It’s not driven by the YouTube algorithm — every collection is themed and curated manually (for now), with a backend I’m automating to fetch and organize new rabbit holes daily. Built as a hybrid Astro + Next.js project, optimized for static generation and speed. I’m also pairing videos with custom summaries and commentary (using AI), and would love feedback from the HN crowd on: Content model (too wide? not specific…
2025 · yourabbit.com
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2015 · non-fiction.org
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