How it works | hackerpicks

hackerpicks reads public Hacker News comments where people say they switched from one tool to another, or recommend or criticize a tool. A language model (Claude Haiku) extracts tool names, the commenter's sentiment and the X → Y move. Every quote is checked to be a verbatim part of the comment, and links to it.

Sentiment and ranking

Recommend: the hacker praises a tool or says they moved to it.
Criticize: the hacker complains about a tool or warns against it. This is shown separately and never counts as a recommendation.
Tools are ranked only by the number of distinct hackers who recommend them. Saying you moved from a tool does not count against it in the ranking; criticism is listed next to it.

Coverage

This version covers 1467 comments from 1317 hackers up to 2026-11-02. Counts are from a sample of switch-phrase comments, not the whole site, so treat them as signals, not market share.

Moves between GitHub repos come from the same labelling done for hackerrepos.org ("use X instead of Y").

Not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News. See the disclosure and open data pledge.