Alternatives
Products that do what We spent the last 18 months building an interactive live video stream does
Hey HN!! Many of us enjoyed the "If YouTube had actual channels" Show HN post last week. As developers of a similar project, we wanted to share our approach to building a simulated live experience. We’ve spent around 18 months working on this and have managed to add some advanced features, including content-based interactivity. We are super excited to be releasing both the live stream and the code behind it. Our idea was to combine the communal watching experience of television with the modern trappings of the interactive web. If you go to the stream, you will be watching along with everyone…
- 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
- 2IB
I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]: > If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos. Hopefully I did that? Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize! [0]…
2024 · lanparty.house
- 3
Experience interactive live streaming made for developers
2023
- 4AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
2022
- 5TH
We've been running The HN Recap for a month to make it easier to consume Hacker News. While this was a PoC in understanding adoption for AI-generated podcasts, we now plan to keep this going, since lots of people are now listening to this daily. Let us know what other content channels you'd like to receive as Podcasts and we'll get on it. Read more about our learnings here → https://wondercraft.ai/blog/learnings-from-1-month-of-ai-pod...
2023 · hackernewsrecap.buzzsprout.com
- 6
- 7OS
We did a "Show HN post" 6 months back of our startup and we're very excited to show everyone how far we've come as well as the lessons we've learnt so far! It's been a roller-coaster so far and we think there's lot more of the same to come! We did apply for Ycombinator funding but got turned down :( But may re-apply soon :) For those that don't know, our startup is called Scirra and we make Construct 2 which is an HTML5 game engine (http://www.scirra.com). Our engine allows anyone to make HTML5 games without knowing any programming. It's only me and my brother working on this and we're based…
2012
- 8SO
Hey HN, My co-founders and I have been working on a project for the last month or so, and we'd like to get your input on it. We wanted to hear your thoughts on what we're doing - so check out our landing page, and let us know what you think/understand. Does it sounds like something you guys would want to use? http://www.thesharedweb.com/alpha/intro We'll tell you guys more about exactly what we're doing as the conversation evolves, but we just wanted to see what the initial reaction is, and what you understand (i.e. are we describing it in a way that makes sense). Really excited to hear your…
2010 · thesharedweb.com
- 9IT
Yesterday I saw a post that was “If YouTube had actual channels” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023) and I was so impressed with the tech-nostalgia that I thought, what if Twitch had channels. So I made this as a clone. Thanks for the inspiration, and go check out https://ytch.xyz if not already familiar.
2024 · twch.xyz
- 10IM
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
- 11HL
I am re posting this because when I had made this post the first time there were a few problem with the site that I had to fix and had not anticipated. I got some nice feedback though, so I thought I'd just make one more post because most of the problems have been fixed. HN Live is an alternative interface to Hacker News which provides all of the data on Hacker News in real time. This allows for the real time viewing of what goes into and leaves the trending page as well as the `newest` section. It is just a personal project, and I would like some feedback if you have any. Thanks Site:…
2015
- 12LL
2019 · livecodestream.com
- 13TV
2021 · usetalk.io
- 14IM
This is our entry in the "spontaneous event creation" ring. I'd love to hear what HN readers think!
2011 · shoutfast.com
- 15HN
We're still in private beta but would love to give more invites and get feedback.
2011
- 16HP
Hey everyone, I've been experimenting with collaborative learning and active learning for a while (I launched Coderoulette a couple of months ago) and I'm launching something new today that I'm really excited about. Online learning is pretty passive (video lectures) and lonely, and I think we could create an online learning experience much engaging and effective than that. Only 5% of people who start a Coursera course finish it. My hypothesis is that we can increase that number significantly by matching learners online in teams of 2-3 and giving them a real project to build together. On top…
2016
- 17IM
Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon
2024 · kopage.com
- 18TE
I have been running some experiments on twitch.tv along the lines of driving traffic to websites via donations. Many streamers will read a message attached to a donation of a certain amount of money on stream in front of all their viewers. Sometimes they will visit a url if that happens to be in the content of the message. On rare occasions they will even share the url with the rest of the stream. I would consider my most recent experiment a success. I follow and watch a few streamers on twitch that play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Three of the streamers I watch recently created a…
2015
- 19IW
TL;DR: https://infstream.com/?code=HN Hi HN – we’re Ben & Callum from Infstream. We’ve always been heavy users of YouTube, for entertainment, education and sharing. Towards the end of last year, we saw more and more horror stories of YouTubers losing their livelihood to the ad algorithm. We decided to build a content-first video platform, which aims to reduce issues by removing advertisers from the equation. Instead, we charge for the content you watch – bold, I know. Instead of paying in advertising and data, users on Infstream build their own streaming package, a channel at…
2020
- 20
Show HN submissions peaked at 6.3x their ChatGPT-launch level, while the number of successful submissions remained relatively flat.
25d ago · orangecrumbs.com
- 21WB
Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…
2024 · dorik.com
- 22SH
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
- 23IP
Hi HN, I’m Ashu, founder of VideoDB. I’ve spent a big chunk of my life building video infrastructure. Not video creation. Video plumbing. The stuff you only learn after production breaks: timebases, VFR, keyframes, audio sync drift, container quirks, partial uploads, live streams, retries, backpressure, codecs, ffmpeg flags, cost blowups, and “why is this clip unseekable on one player but fine on another”. This week we shared VideoDB Skills, a skill pack that lets AI agents call those infra primitives directly, instead of you wiring pipelines with screenshots plus FFmpeg glue. Repo:…
Mar 2026
- 24WV
Hey everyone, my friend and I created a GitHub Wrapped video for developers to showcase their activity on the platform in a more fun way. The implementation is open-source (https://github.com/rendleyhq/github-wrapped-2024) if you're interested in how it was built. To get a bit geeky, we used masks, keyframe animations, luma key shaders to remove the background from the confetti video, and some other techniques. Also, everything is rendered directly in the browser!! I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the rendering performance, especially if you're running this on your…
2024 · rendley.com
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →