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Top 18 Tools for Exploring Hacker News Like a Pro

Hazem Abbas

Mar 26, 2024 — 12 min read

What is Hacker News?

Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Y Combinator, a seed accelerator. Users can submit stories (links to articles), and other users can upvote these stories, similar to "liking" a post on other social media platforms. The most upvoted stories appear on the front page. Users can also comment on these stories, leading to rich discussions.

The service provides a platform for sharing and discussing the latest technology, programming, and entrepreneurship news. This makes it a valuable resource for those interested in these fields.

Benefits of Hacker News!

The benefits of Hacker News are numerous. It provides a real-time, curated feed of the latest tech and startup information. It allows for open discussions and provides the opportunity to receive feedback and engage with a community of like-minded individuals.

The audience on Hacker News is largely made up of programmers, entrepreneurs, and technology enthusiasts. This community is beneficial as it allows for the exchange of ideas, networking, and learning from others' experiences.

In this article, we offer you the best open-source HN clients for desktop, mobile, command-line and the web.

1. Haxor News

Haxor-news is a command-line tool that brings Hacker News to the terminal, allowing users to view and filter posts, comments, linked web content, monthly hiring and freelancers posts, and user info.

It also provides features to filter comments based on various parameters such as unseen comments, recent comments, or comments matching a specific query.

2. Quality News

Quality News, a Hacker News client, offers additional data and insights on submissions, including a new metric called upvoteRate. This metric, derived from the analysis of Hacker News voting data, could potentially enhance the site's ranking algorithm.

Quality News also features live data, similar interface to the original site, and charts detailing each story's rank, upvotes, and upvote rate.

The problem with Hacker News is that the success of a story is partly based on timing and luck, leading to inconsistency in their ranking algorithm. A story can receive varying numbers of upvotes if submitted multiple times.

The best submissions don't always make it to the front page, leading to a misrepresentation of the community's intent.

The solution proposed by Quality News is a new metric, upvoteRate, which assesses the likelihood of a story being upvoted compared to the average story, irrespective of certain factors. This could make the front-page stories more reflective of the community's intent.

3. HNClient

HNClient is a free and open-source desktop client for Hacker News that enables users to read articles and comments without the need for multiple tabs. The app features a sidebar for article selection and supports split-screen viewing. It is compatible with Mac, Linux, and Windows.

4. Hacki (iOS/ Android)

Hacki is a Hacker News client built with Flutter. It allows users to log in with their Hacker News account, browse stories from various categories, search for stories, submit stories, and pin stories.

5. Hacker News Summary with AI

This open-source script enables you to get a summarized news from HackerNews with AI using ChatGPT or GoogleT4 Models. You can view the full features here, or download and install it from its repo here.

6. HNReaderApp (macOS)

The HNReader macOS application is currently in beta and open for issue reports and feature suggestions. The application will be released on the AppStore and brew once optimizations are complete.

It comes with a simple user-friendly interface, and it supports dark and light mode out-of-box.

7. ZCombinator (macOS and iOS)

ZCombinator for Hacker News is an open-source free client made with SwiftUI that allows users to log in with their Hacker News account, reply to and vote on stories/comments, add stories/comments to pins or HN favorites, and view other users' profiles and submissions.

8. OSHit

OSHit is a read-only terminal-based client for HackerNews, allowing users to view top/recent items, comments, and user details. It also provides bindings to open relevant views on HackerNews in a web browser.

9. HackerWeb (Mobile)

HackerWeb is a user-friendly Hacker News app for iOS and Android. It is built using React Native.

10. HackerWeb

HackerWeb is a readable Hacker News web app, initially created to test iOS 5+ Mobile Safari's new CSS support.

The project aims to make the web app look and feel like a native mobile app, specifically an iOS app, but switches to a generic theme for non-iOS devices.

11. The Index

The Index is a simple Hacker News reader app which is focused on making you read less, by only showing you the top stories of the last 24 hours.

The app is written using Flutter and it comes with a clean reader-friendly interface, and fancy choice for fonts and typography. However, it is not ready yet at any of the app stores, so you may download and build the source code yourself.

12. Hax (iPhone)

Hax is a Hacker News client for iPhone, designed to provide a native browsing experience similar to the website. It's built using SwiftUI, supporting features like Dark Mode and Dynamic Type.

The creator, a long-time reader of Hacker News, developed Hax as a way to learn iOS development and to experiment with Apple's latest technologies.

Download from Apple Store.

13. HackerNews Desktop

The HackerNews Desktop project is a C++/Qt(QtQuick) desktop client for accessing Hacker News content, offering features such as voting, viewing and sending comments, sending news, and opening links. However, due to the absence of a proper API, some features like account login can randomly stop working.

Also, the app's page and repo does not include any install binaries yet, but you can still build it from source for your Linux, macOS, or Windows desktop.

14. Ochi

Ochi is a simple command-line interface for navigating Hacker News in the terminal, built with the Textualize/rich and pallets/click packages. The project will be updated with a complete Text User Interface once the Textualize/textual package releases its documentation.

Features

Bookmarks/save stories.
Configuration for colorschemes and defaults.
View post with comments.
View user profile.

15. Minimalist Hackernews Client (Android)

The minimalist hackernews client for android allows users to copy the current URL for sharing by clicking on the floating action button (FAB), clear cache and history by long clicking on the FAB, and navigate back to the previous page using the back button.

The Android App APK is available to download form Github.