AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to What's hot on HN? A visualization of trending topics on HN
I was curious about the most discussed topics on HN over time, so I started analyzing and categorizing all front-page posts with a simple LLM workflow. The result is an interactive chart that displays the trending topics across different time frames. Although the analysis is still relatively basic, I think it provides an interesting perspective on our community. It will be cool to observe changes over a longer time horizon, such as the rise and fall of topics like web3 and AI.
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 hot on HN? A visualization of trending topics on HN launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1HT
2011 · hntrends.jerodsanto.net · its alternatives →
- 2AT
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 →
- 3
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 →
- 4T1
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 →
- 5
Exploding Topics▲949Find proven topics before they take off.
2019 · explodingtopics.com · its alternatives →
- 6HTHN Trends▲33
2023 · hntrends.net · its alternatives →
- 7SW
2013 · hackernewstrends.herokuapp.com · its alternatives →
- 8SH
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 →
- 9VT
2016 · timqian.com · its alternatives →
- 10UF
2021 · trungdq88.github.io · its alternatives →
- 11HH
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 →
- 12
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 →
- 13
http://www.hnshowcase.com Moses (nnythm) and I browse Hacker News daily. Show HN posts are some of our favorite parts of HN. We wanted to create a way to browse Show HN articles, even those that might not quite make it to the front page. We created http://www.hnshowcase.com last weekend to make discovering projects posted on HN easier. It searches all "Show HN" posts and generates a thumbnail view for each of them. You can sort by submission date, points, and number of comments, and navigate with left/right or j/k keys. We used the following technologies: HN Search API, Pyramid web…
2011 · hnshowcase.com · its alternatives →
- 14
- 15WS
We did a quick side project over the weekend and called it HN Trends (while posting we realized there was an older site with the same name so hopefully there is no confusion). We wanted to see what was trending in terms of keywords (buzzwords, tech, etc) and found a nice API. URL: http://www.hntrends.com Let us know what you think - thanks!
2012 · hntrends.com · its alternatives →
- 16
- 17
Hi HN, I built WhatHappened (whathappened.tech) because I have a love/hate relationship with this site. I love the content, but the "wall of text" UI gives me FOMO. I was spending too much time clicking into vague titles ("Project X") or wading through flame wars just to find technical insights. I built this tool to act as a filter. It generates a card for the top daily posts with a few specific features to cut the noise: 1. AI Summaries: It generates a technical TL;DR (3 bullet points) and an ELI5 version for every post. 2. The Heat Meter: I analyze the comment section to visualize the…
Dec 2025 · whathappened.tech · its alternatives →
- 18VT
Hi HN. I was surprised that there wasn't a feature here that lets you go back in time to the front page of Hacker News on a random day...so I made one. http://randomhackernews.com is a simple HTML page that navigates you to the front page of HN on a random day between today and February 19, 2007 (the oldest date I could find with content). I made this for myself, but figured others may find some interest in it.
2024 · randomhackernews.com · its alternatives →
- 19HN
I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
2024 · hn.moritz.pm · its alternatives →
- 20
The Hacker News front page, with a short video explainer for every story.
26d ago · hn.watch · its alternatives →
- 21FH
Hey HN. I created this website. https://pj4533.com/hn-overlooked/ It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this. I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I…
2025 · pj4533.com · its alternatives →
- 22
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 →
- 23HS
Hi HN, TL;DR: I made a website that takes all the top stories on HN and categorizes them into one of ten topics of interest using LangChain and GPT-4. I've always liked the idea of getting a personal mix of news tailored to my interests. Hacker News is pretty close to that ideal, which is reflected in the time I spend on here every day. It's a great mix, but playing with LangChain, I got the idea for a weekend project. Roughly speaking most posts on HN fall into one of these categories: * Programming, Software & Computer Science * AI, Data Science & Analytics * Business & Entrepreneurship *…
2024 · hnto.pics · its alternatives →
- 24
HN Digest▲81Daily digest of comments posted on Hacker News
2023 · hndigest.substack.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- HN Trends - like Google Trends, but for Hacker News alternatives
- Analyzing top HN posts with language models alternatives
- Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun alternatives
- Turning 100-plus comments HN threads into readable discussions alternatives
- Exploding Topics alternatives
- HN Trends 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 →