Alternatives
Products that do what Ycommentator - HN front page with Slashdot-like inline comments does
The comments on HN are often at least as good (if not better!) than the links. I built this app to have a way to quickly read through all the top comments on front page stories. I hope some of you find it useful too.
- 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
- 2CH
Little chrome extension I made to collapse comments on HN, feel free to use it if you want.
2014 · github.com
- 3EH
2016 · comments.network
- 4HC
2023 · gist.github.com
- 5BH
Like others on here, I was inspired by the "personal blogs" post :) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 In proper HN fashion, the site is open-source and requires no JS! There's instructions on how to add/edit a blog on the Github README. [1] https://github.com/surprisetalk/blogs.hn Note that your blog might appear in blogs.json, but not on the site! Right now I'm using the following code to filter out blogs. Your blog might appear if you add more metadata: if ( 3 > 0 + !!blog.title + (blog.desc.length > 40) + !!blog.about + !!blog.now +…
2023 · blogs.hn
- 6HR
2016 · hnreplies.com
- 7ZA
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
2023 · zsync.xyz
- 8T1
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
- 9HC
HN is all about the rich discussions. We wanted to take the HN experience one step further - to bring the familiar keyboard-first navigation, find interesting viewpoints in the threads and get a gist of long threads so that we can decide which rabbit holes to explore. So we built HN Companion a year ago, and have been refining it ever since. Try it: https://app.hncompanion.com or available as an extension for Firefox / Chrome: [0]. Most AI summarization strips the voices from conversations by flattening threads into a wall of text. This kills the joy of reading HN discussions.…
Feb 2026 · hncompanion.com
- 10IM
I was struggling with navigating HN discussions using existing solutions, so I decided to implement a completely different approach, think of it as depth-first reading vs breadth-first reading. Visually it looks like swipeable stacks of comments and it offers several advantages over traditional interfaces: - Comment width doesn't get narrower no matter how deep in the comment tree you are - You always see the parent of the comment you're currently reading - Swiping allows you to move in and out of subtrees with animated transitions that you fully control - You can easily skip subtrees that…
2023 · apps.apple.com
- 11HB
2014 · github.com
- 12AT
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
- 13SH
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
- 14TA
I got fed up with the news reader apps out there so I decided to make my own. Its a simple concept where it tracks all your favorite news sources for new posts and the social shares it received. Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes. It's not meant to be alternative to HN, just a focused way to track your favorite sources. Please try it out and let me know what do you think, http://telescope.surf/ Note: you can do 'Add to Homescreen' on mobile to make it as an app. Please leave a feedback or any feature wishlist you may have. Thanks!
2017
- 15QS
I have a dedicated HN tab that I come back to and reload multiple times a day to see whats new and hot. I wrote a Chrome Extension to: - quickly scan new articles since my last reload - quickly scan highly discussed articles - open actual articles and discussions in a new tab This links to the source code. The chrome extension is linked at the bottom of the github page. Note: - This extension only operates on the HN front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/news) - The first time you reload the HN front page after installing the extension all articles will get highlighted.
2024 · github.com
- 16
- 17BE
2018 · github.com
- 18HI
Hi HN, Sharing HN Insights, a webapp I built that highlights trending themes and summarizes discussion threads from the front page. This started earlier this week as a toy project to test out Gemini 3 Pro in aistudio. I found the POC useful, so I decided to productionize it. I've included the original seed prompt below: > Create an app that creates a summary of the comment threads for hacker news front page. The UX should be similar, but clicking the comments instead opens a summary. The summary is generated when clicked so it can gather new threads. To productionize, I used Claude Code and…
Nov 2025 · hn-insights.com
- 19AH
2016 · florian.github.io
- 20HN
Hacked this up really quickly for fun last night: http://yc.backtype.com Shows the hn front page w/ tweets from your friends. E.g.: http://yc.backtype.com/?x=davemcclure
2011
- 21HE
Reading submissions here, I often feel intrigued and want to explore more interconnected or similar stories. The process of googling and going back and forth didn't feel natural. So, I made this browser extension that adds a related submissions section for HN's layout. The results are displayed in a sidebar right in the page's layout using HN native style just like other elements. I enjoy being knee-deep in discussions. Many times you're learning about something new, where the topic is either unfamiliar, thought-provoking, or just could use some context that you don't even know about. If a…
2024 · github.com
- 22HN
Why another android HN app? I simply wasn't happy with the current solutions, I wanted something simple that I can read the news from the front page. The goal on this app is to improve the readability and ease the browsing of the links. Also readability.com web services are used like alternative for the external links. Here some screenshots: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2111778/HN-Front-Page-Reader1.jpg https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2111778/HN-Front-Page-Reader2.jpg You can download this app for free here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vladocar.hn Technical stuff: HTML, CSS,…
2012
- 23SM
Twitter is often my source of Hacker News, but I had a problem of getting just the news without HN comments, which many times are even better than news itself, so I came up with an idea to have news and comments under the same URL. I parse RSS feeds, put new items in database, get bit.ly short link and post all to Twitter. Links on twitter are like this http://xcode.x10.mx/?id=2411858 and to see HN comments all you need is to move mouse over the handle on the left side. What do you think? Like it, have any suggestions, ideas or anything else in mind feel free to speak up. I'm happily using…
2011
- 24NC
http://mindovermatter.it/ Just a quick and dirty hack I did while learning Go and how to set up an EC2 server. A proof of concept for a feature I think it would be useful on HN. It often happens that I read the whole thread of comments for a discussion, and get back to it at a later time to see the updates. It's hard to see at a glance which comments are new and which ones I already read. The app uses cookies to record the last time you accessed a discussion thread, and modify the html in order to highlight the new comments (the ones added since your last GET of the page).…
2013
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