HN Simulator - A Pointless but Mostly-Exact Clone of Hacker News
HN Simulator is a near-perfect replica of Hacker News that lets you browse, vote, and comment on a simulated feed filled with fictional future tech news—like Claude Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6. It recreates the familiar orange-site experience, including rankings, user profiles, and submission flows, but with a playful twist: all content is fabricated. Perfect for developers who want to explore an alternate-reality HN without leaving the comfort of their browser. Visit news.ycombinator.lol to see it in action.
It's a pointless but mostly-exact clone of Hacker News—a loving tribute that lets you experience the front page of a future that never was.
- ShinyLeftPad
> It's an extremely efficient port of HN to Common Lisp. One of the project's goals was to be high performance.
FWIW your pages seem to load at least 2 times slower here. no idea if real HN has some sort of CDN cache though.
- sfont
Look at a Small Language Models or Gemma4:e2b for generating comments on the server without paying an API for tokens. I explored running these locally for making a very unsophisticated chat bot and it was just slightly too slow for what I wanted, but you don't need instantaneous responses for generating comments on posts.
- caminanteblanco
It's awesome! And it's always cool to me when I get a chance to look at a largerish CL codebase! Congratulations on all the hard work now mostly complete!