HN Watercooler – listen to HN threads as an audio conversation
Hi HN, here's something fun to play with. It takes any HN thread and turns it into an audio conversation so you can listen to the thread while doing other things. I've seen many previous attempts to turn HN threads into podcasts, but they all shared a common issue IMO: trying to reduce the very rich back-and-forth into a single-thread single-reader boring podcast. Instead, I wanted to hear the actual debate from the actual thread! So I asked Claude 3.7 to build this for me as a browser-only app. It just needs a thread URL and an Elevenlabs API key (this all remains in your browser, you can…
HN Watercooler – listen to HN threads as an audio conversation launched on April 17, 2025 with 51 votes, #606 of 7,818 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
HN Watercooler converts Hacker News threads into audio conversations by assigning different voices to commenters and preserving the back-and-forth debate structure. Users provide a thread URL and an Elevenlabs API key to generate a listenable version of discussions, useful for consuming HN content while multitasking. The browser-based tool keeps all processing local with no server storage, and recurring commenters maintain consistent voices throughout the conversation.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
You need an ElevenLabs API key to use this app. Get your key here . Your API key stays in your browser and is never sent to our servers. It's optionally stored in your browser's local storage, if "Remember API key" isfrom onetake-ai.github.io
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, here's something fun to play with. It takes any HN thread and turns it into an audio conversation so you can listen to the thread while doing other things. I've seen many previous attempts to turn HN threads into podcasts, but they all shared a common issue IMO: trying to reduce the very rich back-and-forth…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- HRhackernews.roundtable.audio turns HN posts into live audio discussions2021 · hackernews.roundtable.audio · ▲109
HN Update – Hourly news broadcast of top HN stories2024 · hnup.date · ▲644Hello 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…
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…
The HN Recap – AI generated daily HN podcast2023 · hackernewsrecap.buzzsprout.com · ▲177We'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...
- THTop HN articles in human-read podcast format2017 · ▲42
Hi HN, Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them. So I thought it'd be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to podcasts. Initially, I tried out narrating articles with latest text-to-speech synthesis from Amazon and Google, but it was still pretty bad. Especially with long form content. So I thought I'll do this with real humans, real voice actors. So I made ReadByHumans. [1] We are starting…
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…
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