How this works
HackerProducts answers one question for each product: why do Hacker News people use this, and who says so? It is a prototype built from one year of comments (Nov 2025 to Oct 2026).
Pipeline
- Ingest. 3,768,623 comments from the open-index/hacker-news dataset and the Algolia HN API.
- Prefilter. Rules keep comments with recommendation phrasing ("I use", "switched to", "highly recommend"), links to non-news sites, or a place in an Ask HN thread about tools: 347,262 candidates.
- Extract. Claude Sonnet labels the highest-priority candidates (75,185 so far, 34,513 of which name a product): each product named, the commenter's stance, a verbatim quote, what they use it for, alternatives, and whether they built it. On a 500-comment check against Claude Opus, Sonnet scored 87.8% F1 and Haiku 78.9%, so Sonnet does this step.
- Resolve. Names are merged by link domain or GitHub repo first, then by normalized name; Sonnet reviews near-duplicates ("Postgres" and "PostgreSQL").
- Score. One vote per HN user per product, their latest stance counts, warnings subtract, recent comments count more, and comments by the product's own makers are excluded.
- Synthesize. For products with at least 5 recommenders, Claude Opus groups quotes into praise and caveat themes and writes the two-sentence verdict. Any clause without a citation to a real comment is rejected.
What to keep in mind
- Quotes are verbatim and link to the comment. "Who recommends it" uses only what the commenter said about themselves.
- Only the 75,185 highest-priority of 347,262 candidate comments have been labeled so far, so counts are lower than the real totals.
- Labels come from a model and are sometimes wrong, and products with common names can be mixed up.
Keyboard
j/k move through lists, o opens, / searches, ? shows everything.
Data
Comments come from the open-index/hacker-news dataset (ODC-BY license) and the HN Algolia API. Quotes are short excerpts, each linked to its comment on news.ycombinator.com. HackerProducts is an independent project, not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News.
Everything is static. Download products.json, or append .json data from any product page.