nowfound

Life & fun · February 21, 2025

PY

Preview Your HN Post Before Posting (Because I Messed Up Mine)

Hey HN, I finally decided to stop lurking and posted on HN only to be discouraged by the confusing formatting rules. So I built a formatter https://hnpostformatter.blancotech.com. Some backstory. When I went to post, I discovered a mysterious formatting system not known to the regular person https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc. Simple, I thought. I'm sure there are like 50 formatters other patrons like me on HN built, that I can use to format before posting. I searched, and of course I found what I needed here.…

Preview Your HN Post Before Posting (Because I Messed Up Mine) launched on February 21, 2025 with 5 votes and more than 75% of that year's launches.

Visit hnpostformatter.blancotech.com ↗Alternatives

What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hey HN, I finally decided to stop lurking and posted on HN only to be discouraged by the confusing formatting rules. So I built a formatter https://hnpostformatter.blancotech.com. Some backstory. When I went to post, I discovered a mysterious formatting system not known to the regular person…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • I built an interactive HN SimulatorNov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run · ▲538

    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…

  • I asked an HN member for feedback and she blew my mind2010 · slideshare.net · ▲453

    A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!

  • AT
    Analyzing 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…

  • BH
    Blogs.hn – tiny blog directory2023 · blogs.hn · ▲224

    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 +…

  • Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward Quality Comments2023 · zsync.xyz · ▲207

    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…

  • Our weekend project - HN Showcase, browse "Show HN" posts2011 · hnshowcase.com · ▲63

    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…

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, February 2025

the whole month →
  • Screen Studio 3.0▲1,832

    Beautiful screen recordings with instant shareable links

    Growth · 2025 · screen.studio

  • Tana▲1,665

    Put your notes to work with voice and AI

    AI · 2025 · tana.inc

  • IG
    I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam▲1,581

    I was at FB/Meta from late 2013 to early 2023, mostly working in the compiler/runtime spaces. I got hit in the spring 2023 layoff wave. I immediately started making games in my newfound free time (a lifelong interest, and I even worked in AA(A?) back ca. ~2000), and in October 2023 I stumbled upon the idea of a roguelike pachinko/plinko game inspired by Luck Be A Landlord. Things snowballed quickly, I started talking to publishers, then worked like crazy through all of 2024, almost the hardest I've ever worked in my career, and launched the game in December 2024. It's sold…

    Work · 2025

  • Tanka▲1,410

    AI Messenger with smart reply & long term memory for teams

    AI · 2025 · tanka.ai

  • Tool Finder▲1,327

    Your shortcut to better software

    AI · 2025 · toolfinder.com

  • I built an app to stop me doomscrolling by touching grass▲1,203

    i wanted to change the habit of reaching for my phone in the morning and doomscrolling away an hour so i built an app to help me. now i have to literally touch grass before accessing my most distracting apps the app is built in swiftui, uses the screen time apis provided by apple and google vision to recognise grass or not i'd love to get your thoughts on the concept.

    Life & fun · 2025 · touchgrass.now