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Find healthy open-source libraries

A searchable, reviewed catalogue of open-source libraries and projects, including live forks and projects needing help or sponsors.

10asks, each re-read
10separate threads
9of 19 years
3since 2024
2011first asked

Asks per year

’08’1011’121’141’16’18’2011’2211’242’26

What the askers want

  • Would pay0%
  • Want it local or private0%
  • Object to subscriptions0%
  • Want it open source or self-hosted10%
  • Want AI to do it0%

Share of the 10 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.

What exists on Show HN

Built, still asked for1 Show HN launches do this job, and 4 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.

Instead of: GitHub

The idea, as matched

A searchable directory of open source projects and small focused libraries that shows activity, health, licence and reviews, and finds forks, maintainers to sponsor or projects that need help.

Jev first matched 13 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 10 of 13.

Every ask, newest first

Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.

Reader’s note. Mixed sub-asks: forks, sponsors, small libraries.

  1. Mar 2025Wants a simple way to find maintainers to sponsor for tools they use but do not depend on. Read it: a comment in “fd: A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'”
  2. Feb 2025Wants a browsable directory of interesting, little-known software projects. Read it: a comment in “Linux as co-operative Windows process (2017)”
  3. Nov 2024Wants search that surfaces small, focused, dependency-free libraries instead of bloated ones. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: I created a lightweight JavaScript library to visualize JSON as a graph”
  4. Oct 2023Wants a way to discover open source projects that need UI or frontend help. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Web app to generate AI pictures with logos "hidden" in them”
  5. Jun 2022Wants a tool that crawls project forks and shows which are current, behind or ahead. Read it: a comment in “Sshfs Is Orphaned”
  6. Jan 2021Wants a site listing production-quality open source projects by language and domain, to learn backend architecture. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: How to find production-ready open source projects to learn from?”
  7. Jul 2015Wants one website that searches the module repositories for Node, Python, Ruby and Perl together. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: How to search the module repositories of node, Python, ruby and perl”
  8. Sep 2013Wants a credible site that reviews general-purpose libraries and compares strengths and weaknesses, saving hours of research. Read it: a comment in “Formance.js – Library for formatting and validating form fields”
  9. Jun 2012Wants a directory of embeddable programming languages. Read it: a comment in “Embeddable Common Lisp”
  10. Jun 2011Wants an online curated catalog of libraries like this, instead of bookmarking them individually. Read it: a comment in “Optimizely Open-Sources Guiders.js, a Library to Help You Guide New Users”

Building this?

Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.

See all 100How the counts work

Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own

This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.

Get your own box

$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.