Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to What's HN Working On – A structured dataset
The latest Ask HN: What are you working[1] on thread just dropped. And to give my own answer, building structured datasets! I wrote a quick scraper for the HN comments. Just pulling every top level comment along with its replies as a nested object. This ended up pulling 642 top level comments with about 458 replies. I created a posrgres db with this original data set. The replies I just concatenated together in the order they came in (with an indent field to mark what level comment it was. Then stringified the json array and added it to the db. I generated the structured data using my own…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. What's HN Working On – A structured dataset launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.
2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · its alternatives →
- 2

Thinking, Fast and Slow - with 523 comments from the Hacker News community
2021 · hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 3HA
Paste the following into the console of any HN page - for annotated avatars on all HN comments. (self contained code) for(u of document.querySelectorAll('.hnuser'))for(u.prepend(c=document.createElement('canvas')),x=c.getContext('2d'),c.width=18,c.height=14,s=u.innerText,r=1,i=28+s.length;i--;i>>29>X*X/3+Y/2&&x.fillRect(6+2*X,2*Y,2,2)&x.fillRect(6-2*X,2*Y,2,2):r+=s.charCodeAt(i-28,x.fillStyle='#'+(r>>8&0xFFFFFF).toString(16)))r^=r>>17,r^=r>2
2022 · its alternatives →
- 4AT
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 →
- 5

Public datsets made with https://getomni.ai/. Contribute to getomni-ai/datasets development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6

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 →
- 7

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 · its alternatives →
- 8

Hello HN, I was away from my computer for two weeks, and after coming back and reading the latest discussions on HN about coding assistants (models, harnesses), I felt very out of the loop. My normal process would have been to keep reading and figure out the latest and greatest from people's comments, but I wanted to try and automate this process. Basically the goal is to get a quick overview over which coding models are popular on HN. A next iteration could also scan for harnesses that people use, or info on self-hosting or hardware setups. I wrote a short intro on the page about the…
2024 · hnup.date · its alternatives →
- 9

Little chrome extension I made to collapse comments on HN, feel free to use it if you want.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10HH
Hi HN! A few days ago I saw a graph[0] that showed the # of job postings on HN was declining. I started wondering what other trends I could glean from the data, so I created this! You can filter through the top level comments by keyword; for example you can filter by "remote" to see the massive spike around March 2020. Another interesting thing I found is that I can compare hiring across cities. I hope you enjoy! I made it so that the links to your search are sharable so if you have some interesting data you should be able to just link the page you're on! [0]…
2023 · hnhiringtrends.com · its alternatives →
- 11HR
2016 · hnreplies.com · its alternatives →
- 12SH
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 →
- 13

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 · its alternatives →
- 14

2014 · kolinko.github.io · its alternatives →
- 15

Generate startup ideas on a particular topic, based on insights from Hacker News comments.
2023 · hn-ideas.tjcx.me · its alternatives →
- 16

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 →
- 17IU
Hello! I used an LLM to extract structured data from each comment on the “Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (January 2024)” post, available at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38842977. This created a dataset of 400+ jobs with data such as title, company name, location, is job remote, salary data, and the URL/email to contact. For the UI, a NextJS static site was created to filter and view the structured data.
2024 · hnjobsai.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 18EH
2016 · comments.network · its alternatives →
- 19T1
HN has some of the best discussions on the internet, but I don’t love reading 100 comments to find 10 great insights. This site analyzes top HN threads with LLMs and summarizes the key ideas, disagreements, and resources — while preserving links to the original discussion. Useful for revisiting old threads as well. Updated daily, manual-assisted for quality, no spam, fan project only. Would love thoughts from the community. https://hn-discussions.top
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 20UF
2021 · trungdq88.github.io · its alternatives →
- 21

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 · its alternatives →
- 22

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 · its alternatives →
- 23

All posts since 2006 (+3.3M), without including comments.
2019 · kaggle.com · its alternatives →
- 24IR
2018 · hn.walzr.com · 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 →