One of the strengths of hacker news is how the core site hasn't really changed (no broken links on any story back to ~2007 as far as I can tell). This steadiness is a rare and valuable feature.
The fact that they do this yet also expose the data and access to enable a proliferation of cool alternatives views like this one is extremely user-friendly. Unfortunately, the rest of the internet seems to be going in a different direction and locking things down.
hckrnews.com gets about 40% the traffic of news.ycombinator.com, in terms of referrers to my blog (digitalseams.com) - way more than I would have expected.
I can't even imagine another site with that much usage of alternative clients; maybe Reddit before their controversial API changes?
Wait Digg is back and they have the Apollo dev? I left Reddit over the api mess, Apollo was the only way I liked using their service. Def gonna look into that
Glad I'm not the only one who stayed away from Reddit after the initial boycott. I used to be a regular contributor with a bunch of front page posts. Being away made me m realize how much time, effort, and stress I put into building magic internet points. Now I spend that time doing things for myself instead.
Yep, before Apollo I’d occasionally end up on Reddit randomly, and with that app I found myself getting pretty involved in some wonderful communities. But the whole thing was the final nail for me, and now I’m here but not nearly as engrossed which is nice
Noticed the site flickers when loading. Out of curiosity, I disabled JavaScript and reloaded the site. Unfortunately, the site doesn't work at all without JavaScript, whereas the official Hacker News frontend handles this use-case well.
I understand browsing without JavaScript isn't considered a valid use-case nowadays, but it would be nice if the site performed some sort of server-side data fetching. That way users don't experience flickering. As a bonus, while waiting for JavaScript to load, users can at least see headlines (but maybe not stories; that's totally fine).
Probably because of the "Show" / "Hide" thing. He should just use CSS for that. You can mimick it by some CSS hack with checkboxes (that are not really checkboxes as far as the user is concerned).
You can have a modal, and multi-step CAPTCHA in CSS, so it should be relatively easy to just stick to CSS for this functionality.
One thing that I miss, that I use a lot on HN, is the hide feature. It helps me clear the clutter of stuff that I either already read or am not going to read
Thank you very much, it looks very cool. Personally, I miss the *hotkeys* because it's not very convenient to constantly click "show" on the automatically collapsing settings block.
I have a feature branch that's working on just that. I'll get that up soon. In the meantime, configs are stored locally so they’re saved across sessions.
Would have been good if the familiar navbar would have been retained. Btw /show gave 404. Trivial to support those urls. The filters were too tough to find.
"Random recent" browsing is the best way to read Hacker News. It's not addictive, it gives you a quick sample of what people are thinking about recently, prevents your own biases from narrowing your view, etc. For example, https://rnsaffn.com/zg2/ where each page refresh gives you a random post, plus its parent thread, plus some detail about that post's author's history.
I currently use https://hnrss.github.io/ (another great project), but the additional filters (once they are available as params) would be nice for rss.
As long as I am here, thanks to whoever is responsible for https://hckrnews.com, too.
* Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params. That has a lot of usability improvements including being able to share the state, bookmark it, and heads up the current state. Use Rison [1] for the URL params to make it nice to read.
* The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence.
> Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params
Working on this
> The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence.
Makes sense i'll give it a shot.
Thanks for the suggestions, open to more if you think of any!
The top comment right now on /bestcomments was from 7 days ago. It's like some comments only "arrive" onto that series of pages when they get enough votes.
I would just have a timeline of all comments that become best. It could be sorted by how new they are to any thread since being submitted to it, or, how new they are to actually becoming classified as a best comment.
Former: "freshest best comments"
Latter: "newest best comments"
To make it really nice, show each comment, and be able to close it from viewing and then remember the state between sessions. That way people can go through each comment and they don't have to read it twice - they've already closed it after having read it. A bit like an RSS reader. Or the person could even delete read or ignored comments. Wait maybe an alternative to all this is to provide 2 rss feeds of previous timelines: new/fresh.
Just tried it on mobile—works very nicely. One thing you could consider would be the ability to upvote a post from the hcker news page (ie you click on a link and read the post and then you come back to hcker page (close other tab) and want to upvote it but don’t necessarily want to go to the commments page. You’d have to be logged in to HN already, I presume. Not sure if this is even possible, just mentioning FWIW
Are you having issues viewing this on mobile? Which browser/device?
edit: I broke something yesterday and just fixed it. Thanks for the heads up. I tried to put some thought into making it useable on mobile, hope you try it again.
I like that it’s inspired by hckrnews.com but it’s not installed like a pwa, it just opens as a new tab when I add it to the iOS home screen. Hckrnews behaves much more like an app without browser chrome.
Other than that I like it and will use it instead of hckrnews
I just added a manifest, so you should be able to install it as a pwa, but some of the styling is rough around the edges in pwa mode. I'll clean it up.
Appreciate it! You can currently view by resort by number of comments if you switch top Top Comment view but I suppose allowing you to toggle between all is a trivial add. will add that.
the colored vertical bar represents unseen stories.
Thanks! Yeah, I really like hckrnews.com and used it every day. I built this at first because I wanted a dark mode version and then I got a little carried away, lol.
The fact that they do this yet also expose the data and access to enable a proliferation of cool alternatives views like this one is extremely user-friendly. Unfortunately, the rest of the internet seems to be going in a different direction and locking things down.
I can't even imagine another site with that much usage of alternative clients; maybe Reddit before their controversial API changes?
I understand browsing without JavaScript isn't considered a valid use-case nowadays, but it would be nice if the site performed some sort of server-side data fetching. That way users don't experience flickering. As a bonus, while waiting for JavaScript to load, users can at least see headlines (but maybe not stories; that's totally fine).
You can have a modal, and multi-step CAPTCHA in CSS, so it should be relatively easy to just stick to CSS for this functionality.
http://fastHNreader.com
And I saw this post from it :)
I am curious how different the features and design were around the time of the fork.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit (2005)
That's a fun read. Hats off for Aaron.
Usually not a fan of abnormal scrolling, but that's a good time.
One thing that I miss, that I use a lot on HN, is the hide feature. It helps me clear the clutter of stuff that I either already read or am not going to read
btw, to those who want a dark mode for hcrknews, try: https://hckrnews.com/beta/
Perhaps, you should send a pull request to add this.
One of the best things about it (as mentioned in article) is the ability to see the top comment on any item very quickly.
Try it here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180804173424/http://hackerbra....
Press "top" on any item. Also try the number on each.
Note how the comments can toggle open/shut and the colors.
I would definitely use that feature. :)
Also note the byline indents, curved boxes, spacing and popups on each single comment link.
Why?
Any plans for rss?
I currently use https://hnrss.github.io/ (another great project), but the additional filters (once they are available as params) would be nice for rss.
As long as I am here, thanks to whoever is responsible for https://hckrnews.com, too.
It's just jarring though to switch the actual Hacker News comment section from the site.
* Clarify relationship with https://hckrnews.com/
* Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params. That has a lot of usability improvements including being able to share the state, bookmark it, and heads up the current state. Use Rison [1] for the URL params to make it nice to read.
* The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence.
--
1: https://github.com/kou64yama/rison2?tab=readme-ov-file
clarified in the about page.
> Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params
Working on this
> The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence.
Makes sense i'll give it a shot.
Thanks for the suggestions, open to more if you think of any!
Does one exist already?
There's no api for that (I don't think?), but I'm not averse to scraping. I suppose it'd work decently as a fourth view.
Would you want to just see it as a list of comments or also in a timeline view as well?
I would just have a timeline of all comments that become best. It could be sorted by how new they are to any thread since being submitted to it, or, how new they are to actually becoming classified as a best comment. Former: "freshest best comments" Latter: "newest best comments"
To make it really nice, show each comment, and be able to close it from viewing and then remember the state between sessions. That way people can go through each comment and they don't have to read it twice - they've already closed it after having read it. A bit like an RSS reader. Or the person could even delete read or ignored comments. Wait maybe an alternative to all this is to provide 2 rss feeds of previous timelines: new/fresh.
!!
edit: I broke something yesterday and just fixed it. Thanks for the heads up. I tried to put some thought into making it useable on mobile, hope you try it again.
Well done! I will be using it.
Other than that I like it and will use it instead of hckrnews
How about view by #comments (besides time / #points)?
What does the colored vertical bar to the left of some posts represent?