HN Avatars in 357 bytes
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
HN Avatars in 357 bytes launched on March 14, 2022 with 701 votes, #3 of 3,153 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
HN Avatars in 357 bytes is a developer tool that generates unique visual avatars for Hacker News users based on their usernames. Users paste a single line of self-contained JavaScript code into the browser console on any HN page to add small colored pixel avatars next to all comments. The tool creates distinct, procedurally generated graphics for each user without requiring external resources, making it lightweight and immediately functional.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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<28?r>>>29>X*X/3+Y&…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
I built an interactive HN SimulatorNov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run · ▲538Hey 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…
Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · ▲520Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.
I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscriptJul 2026 · github.com · ▲433HN is great for the links people share, but a big part of the value I get comes from reading the discussion around them. I realized I was always opening the article in one tab and the comments in another, constantly switching back and forth. I figured there was probably a simpler way, so I threw together this userscript to merge the two. 1. Clicking a link from Hacker News opens the article with a side panel containing the discussion. It doesn't require your credentials, is resizable, and is easy to tweak if you want to customize it. 2. If you land on an article that has previously been…
- EHEmbed HN comments in your website2016 · comments.network · ▲137
HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HNDec 2025 · hn-wrapped.kadoa.com · ▲313I was looking for some fun project to play around with the latest Gemini models and ended up building this :) Enter your username and get: - Generated roasts and stats based on your HN activity 2025 - Your personalized HN front page from 2035 (inspired by a recent Show HN [0]) - An xkcd-style comic of your HN persona It uses the latest gemini-3-flash and gemini-3-pro-image (nano banana pro) models, which deliver pretty impressive and funny results. A few examples: - dang: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang - myself: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo Give…
- ATAnalyzing top HN posts with language models2022 · ▲117
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…
More dev tools this month
the category →
open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 28d ago · github.com
Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 26d ago · github.com
OpenBot▲362Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer
Dev tools · 23d ago · openbot.run
Talanoa▲346Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…
Dev tools · 21d ago · talanoa.email
CoreSpeed▲332One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools
Dev tools · 28d ago · corespeed.io
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, March 2022
the whole month →- IM
Hi HN! I made many small web games in the past with Unity or Phaser. But this time I wanted to make something completely on my own. So I coded a basic game framework in plain JavaScript, and used it to make Almost Pong. This was a really fun project that taught me a lot about JavaScript, and I plan to make more minimalist games with this framework. Interesting fact: Almost Pong doesn't load any assets, all sprites and sounds are generated with code. Happy to answer questions, and please let me know if you have any feedback on the game. Thanks!
Dev tools · 2022 · lessmilk.com
- IM
Life & fun · 2022 · networksfromscratch.com
How well do you know your area? Test your knowledge by locating streets on a map.
Work · 2022 · backofyourhand.com
