10 ms·

HN Alternative UIs

158 points by lgats 6y ago

judge2020 6y ago
At first I thought this was going to be a list of the HN users that clicked the link but thankfully it’s not :)
pugio 6y ago
This seems like the right place to ask: I remember some months ago there being a discussion about a dark mode for HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966 . It seemed at the time like dang was amenable to adding it, but nothing seemed to to come of it. Am I missing a setting somewhere? Dark mode is the only reason I use an external app for viewing HN.
- wyclif 6y ago
  Why won't HN offer dark mode?
  - skissane 6y ago
    I think it is a matter of development time/resources. One issue is that HN is not really open source. Although there was an open source release years ago, the current code base is an evolution of that and closed. It then comes down to how much time/money Y Combinator is willing to invest in enhancing it, and I assume more essential stuff takes priority over nice-to-haves like dark mode. I think, ideally, the current version could be open sourced, and then people could contribute PRs to add stuff like dark mode. I think dang has said before that the reason why they don't do that, is they don't want to expose certain "secret sauce" (abuse/spam detection, voting code, etc), since if the algorithms were exposed people would exploit them. I guess one solution would be to split the code base into open core and closed plugins, open source the core and then keep the secret sauce in the closed plugins. But, I guess that would take time to carry out that refactoring, which comes back to the issue of limited development time/resources and what priorities that will be spent on.
    - tester34 6y ago
      Imma be kinda snarky here SV VCs struggle with once per long time peroid 500 HTML LoC page layout change?
      - tomcam 6y ago
        You sound pretty accomplished. I bet you could write a Hacker News clone in a weekend. I bet you could even attract an audience the same size in, what, a year or two? I’ll check back after this weekend and see how you’re doing.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        It's not that they struggle. HN's layout itself does a lot of work shaping the community here, so they understandably want to be careful about changing things.
  - neilpanchal 6y ago
    As @dang said, I admire the HN philosophy - “Move slowly and preserve things.” There is no need for a dark mode. Just use a style extension. We are all tech savvy people here.
  - chmaynard 6y ago
    Dan, Re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966 It's been four months since you agreed that dark mode for HN is a good idea. Any progress? If not, what is blocking you? Can I help? Craig -- We just don't have much dev time. Sorry for the delay. We'll get there. I appreciate the offer of help but we're not currently set up to accept contributions that way... Dan
- square_usual 6y ago
  You can use stylus (Firefox: [1], Chrome: [2]) to set a userstyle for HN. I have mine set to a lovely zenburn dark. [3] 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ 2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpeebahjckkjfobafhncgmne?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe... 3: https://github.com/UserStyles/hacker-news-zenburn-dark https://github.com/UserStyles/hacker-news-zenburn-dark
  - oefrha 6y ago
    My extensions to hacker-news-zenburn-dark to make downvote state of comments visible: /** * The following colors are chosen with the linear map f(c): [#000000, #ffffff] -> [#dcdccc, #404040] where * f(#000000) = #dcdccc and f(#ffffff) = #404040. */ .c5a, .c5a *, .c5a a:link, .c5a a:visited { color:#a5a59b !important; } .c73, .c73 *, .c73 a:link, .c73 a:visited { color:#96968d !important; } .c82, .c82 *, .c82 a:link, .c82 a:visited { color:#8c8c85 !important; } .c88, .c88 *, .c88 a:link, .c88 a:visited { color:#898981 !important; } .c9c, .c9c *, .c9c a:link, .c9c a:visited { color:#7d7d76 !important; } .cae, .cae *, .cae a:link, .cae a:visited { color:#72726c !important; } .cbe, .cbe *, .cbe a:link, .cbe a:visited { color:#686864 !important; } .cce, .cce *, .cce a:link, .cce a:visited { color:#5e5e5b !important; } .cdd, .cdd *, .cdd a:link, .cdd a:visited { color:#555553 !important; }
  - gala8y 6y ago
    Stylus Privacy Policy: "Unlike other similar extensions, we don't find you to be all that interesting. Your questionable browsing history should remain between you and the NSA. Stylus collects nothing. Period."
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Stylus is a surveillance-free fork of Stylish, created after the latter turned evil.
- dartharva 6y ago
  The DarkReader (darkreader.org) extension gives a beautiful dark theme to HN, just make sure you set the theme mode to "Static" instead of the default "Dynamic".
- rarefied_tomato 6y ago
  While useful, I'm averse to the complexity of such features. The steady devolution of Reddit's UX scares me. I also enjoy the offloaded ecosystem of sites like hn.algolia.com. It feels healthy for a hacker community to build these tailored readers.
  - hutattedonmyarm 6y ago
    Dark mode can be done purely in CSS with media queries. I wouldn’t call it complex
    - rarefied_tomato 6y ago
      I see: prefers-color-scheme wouldn't bother me.
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        I agree it shouldn’t be another HN setting when we already have a standard for it.
- darekkay 6y ago
  I wrote a userscript until a Dark Mode is supported natively: https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/blob/20b5858ff7a464fee11d0fc4d9a92ac87ba2ef28/userscripts/better-styles.user.js#L28 https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/blob/20b5858ff7a464...
- ffpip 6y ago
  Add to uBlock origin. To the "My filters" section. ycombinator.com##html:style(background-color: #3e3e42 !important) ycombinator.com###hnmain:style(background-color: #2E2E31 !important) ycombinator.com##.age:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.c00:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.comhead > a:style(color: #dedede !important) ycombinator.com##.comhead:style(color: #dedede !important) ycombinator.com##.hnuser:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.subtext > a:link:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.subtext > a:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.subtext:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.title > a:style(color: #dedede !important) ycombinator.com##a:link:style(color: #ccc !important) Source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23200038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23200038
  - pugio 6y ago
    Thank you, that's very helpful for desktop, but I'm primarily interested in having this on my phone. There are many nice extensions for desktop browsers, but the only way to get dark mode on my phone (currently) is to use a 3rd party app.
    - ratherbefuddled 6y ago
      It works fine on Firefox mobile.
    - sexy_seedbox 6y ago
      If you're on Android, then Kiwi Browser's dark mode works great.
- sydd 6y ago
  All these custom stylesheets and extensions are nice, but still are a clunky workaround and sometimes a potential security issue
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Might sound strange, but when I "downgraded" my phone's display to IPS (as found on my iPhone 6s, and as opposed to AMOLED on my former Samsung phones), I had the impression to see HN in all its creamy-ness as intended for the first time in years, whereas on AMOLED with its tendency towards over-saturation, the light yellow background always seemed somewhat arbitrary and synthetic. This is in addition to the much better contrast and natural look of dark backgrounds possible on AMOLED, so clearly, while the problem is going to come back to hurt me, the desire for dark mode is driven by AMOLED. I wonder what CSS should do about this on top of prefers-color-scheme media queries; having to decide to optimize for AMOLED vs IPS seems odd when device color profiles have been a thing for ages.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I think the plan was to make it dependent on the ‘prefer-dark’ css setting or something. I think the main problem is settling on a particular theme.
icy 6y ago
Missed http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ :')
- watermelon59 6y ago
  I love it that it doesn't load by design if the referer is HN. For anyone wondering: yeah, you have to copy and paste the link. Don't click it, it won't work. n-gate is my favorite way to consume HN.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Await the court-martial for violating the Prime Directive ;).
divbzero 6y ago
My three favorite HN readers are — [1]: https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ "hckr news" [2]: https://hackernewsletter.com/ https://hackernewsletter.com/ "Hacker Newsletter" [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front "HN’s daily front page" They offer good ways to browse HN posts on slower cadence.
- smichel17 6y ago
  It's the newsletter still active? The archive seems last updated in 2019.
  - divbzero 6y ago
    The archive on the website looks stale but the newsletter is still active by email. The latest newsletter was Issue #534 emailed on 2020-12-19.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - duck 6y ago
    It is still active... I've just been lazy and haven't fix the archive yet.
    - smichel17 6y ago
      FYI, I subscribed and I like the format, but I will probably unsubscribe because every link goes through a tracking domain instead of directly to the article/comments :(
nikitaga 6y ago
There's also my old dog http://hnapp.com http://hnapp.com, and Dan Grossman's http://www.hnreplies.com/ http://www.hnreplies.com/ (I think it qualifies as "alternative UI")
cheeaun 6y ago
Nice to see hackerweb on the list :) A little self-promo here, I just released a new V2 of HackerWeb for iOS https://apps.apple.com/app/id1084209377 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1084209377 - it's still built with React Native, open-sourced https://github.com/cheeaun/hackerweb-native-2 https://github.com/cheeaun/hackerweb-native-2 with a really nice UI that I've designed, especially for comment threads. It'll be free until end of the year. Cheers.
- rcarmo 6y ago
  Still for iPhone only, I see :(
  - cheeaun 6y ago
    There's the web and (older) Android version too :) https://hackerwebapp.com/ https://hackerwebapp.com/
    - rcarmo 6y ago
      I use an iPad and like the web version, but would love to have the new one...
- tomcam 6y ago
  Do you license the HN content or just pirate it?
  - cheeaun 6y ago
    Not sure you mean, content is from the API https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API
    - tomcam 6y ago
      I’ll be damned! Didn’t know about the API. My apologies and I heartily encourage downvotes for my rudeness.
kaelig 6y ago
I made https://www.read.hn/ https://www.read.hn/, for users of Instapaper. Clicking a link to a story opens it in Instapaper. It's styled using my personal Instapaper theme, so reading HN feels like I'm on the same site whether I'm on the homepage or reading a story. (Optimized for mobile, no tracking/analytics, very lightweight, and open source)
- Aeolun 6y ago
  This looks very nice. Subscribed to instapaper and will try it a bit.
varbhat 6y ago
I am perfectly fine with main UI of HN , that is news.ycombinator.com . Although,i agree that some improvements can be made. One Pro of main UI is that it is simple and very fast without fancy moving parts. I like it a lot.
- hliyan 6y ago
  I was about to suggest a feature where we could collapse comment replies below a certain vote threshold but then decided against it. It's better to leave the responsibility of scanning through and deciding what to read on the reader themselves, rather than an algorithm. Which is where problems usually begins. At times it's a bit of a pain scanning and scrolling through reams of comments trying to find things I find valuable, but it's better than the alternative, I feel.
  - tpxl 6y ago
    Having to expand every single comment in reddit threads is infuriating. The HN UI is just the right amount of information dense and readable for me.
    - aldanor 6y ago
      It's ok because HN is much smaller; on Reddit, there are posts with 20k+ comments - for those, thread collapsing kinda makes sense (which doesn't validate collapsing comment threads everywhere else though).
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    Comments already get marked as dead/hidden if there are too many downvotes I thought? You actually have to go into your profile and enable a checkpoint just to see them at all.
  - jsinai 6y ago
    I agreed that it’s better than the alternative. Also the alternative has the risk of amplifying echo chamber viewpoints. And then there is the fundamental of how new would comments break the barrier of getting upvoted in the first place?
iansinnott 6y ago
Not sure hn.algolia.com counts as a reader. It's a great tool, but it just links back to this site as far as I've seen.
xgbi 6y ago
My personal favorite is https://hn.premii.com https://hn.premii.com It has an iOS app which is just a packaging of the web app, but I find the rendering just right.
- brianzelip 6y ago
  Thanks for this! I just got a new phone with latest ios, and my HN reader (this one) was the one app that didn’t get transferred because “it’s no longer available in the App Store”. Even the in-app about links lead to “not available anymore” in app stores. Wonder if there is at least a PWA under the hood...
  - mfkp 6y ago
    Same thing on Android, it was removed from the play store. Luckily I had a copy of the .apk on my old phone and could copy it over. It's my main source of consuming and interacting with HN (including writing this comment).
smusamashah 6y ago
Is there a reader which shows all links in a thread? I like to collect links from HN and currently thinking of making a chrome extension for this. Later I plan to play with API to draw a graph/tree with a threads as nodes and see linked pages and threads.
- jraph 6y ago
  One idea for you then: I think it's not rare to see a link from a thread, or a related link, show up in its own submission soon after. Maybe linking those would be nice too.
dotmanish 6y ago
Happy user of Octal ( https://github.com/dangwu/Octal https://github.com/dangwu/Octal ) for iOS here.
allenleein 6y ago
I use Dracula theme and its delightful:) Feel free to use it: https://github.com/allenleein/hackernews-dracula https://github.com/allenleein/hackernews-dracula
webscout 6y ago
https://upstract.com https://upstract.com also has a section for HN, and then some...
rognjen 6y ago
I've been using the HN RSS for a long while. It works fine in your reader of choice. I am kind of disappointed with this submission though because I was expecting an analysis of the people who read HN, aka HN readers.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tonka3000 6y ago
I prefer https://raycast.com https://raycast.com on MacOS for the last couple of weeks. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4332171/97564988-5f2a3300-19dd-11eb-863b-005c1a15a6b2.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4332171/97564988-5...
- AH4oFVbPT4f8 6y ago
  How did you set this up within raycast ?
jshmrsn 6y ago
Since I have a bad habit of checking Reddit many times per day, I often arrive at HN via my subscription to r/hackernews
gala8y 6y ago
Little add-on for Firefox, which highlights newly added comments after page refresh on main HN site. Really useful. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-comment-highlight/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-c...
mrweasel 6y ago
I kinda miss quiethn.com, but that's a spam site now.
- snickmy 6y ago
  what was it about ?
  - lgats 6y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20171001013212/https://quiethn.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171001013212/https://quiethn.c...
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    It was just the headlines, no comments, no point, no nothing. Great if you just wanted to see what was new, but not get lost in the comments. It's a little dumb, I could just make my own clone in 30 minutes.
polote 6y ago
A funny way to get this list is to publish a post on HN, wait a few days and check the list of backlinks on Google console
qznc 6y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/ Over 50k subscribers on the subreddit.
miked85 6y ago
Ranked by Alexa popularity. How many HN readers are actually installing the Alexa plugin/extension?
npteljes 6y ago
I like to visit hckrnews.com first, because I can quickly see what the most engaged topics were. The good thing is that it's just an alternative main site, it doesn't take over the comments section.
freetonik 6y ago
Shameless plug, here's a "30 random good HN posts from the past"-reader I made just yesterday: https://thn.rakhim.org/ https://thn.rakhim.org/
sampsa 6y ago
I built an iOS app for my own specific preference: no clutter, opens links in reader mode and dark mode included. Settings can be changed from the iOS settings. Hope it’s the choice of somebody else as well: https://apps.apple.com/app/hakkeri-readable-hacker-news/id1115084104 https://apps.apple.com/app/hakkeri-readable-hacker-news/id11...
- raydev 6y ago
  How did you get past app review? I tried to ship a free HN reader with more features than this one and was told I didn't meet the minimum functionality requirements.
MrJagil 6y ago
I personally am longing for a HN-app that copies the UI/UX exactly. Down to a T. The reason is, whenever I use Safari for consumption I find myself suddenly surfing endlessly and needlessly.
antouank 6y ago
Just curious, does any of those alternative readers let you log in and upvote or comment, etc? PS I've created https://hack.ernews.info https://hack.ernews.info, and was trying out the authentication part. Got upvoting to work for now.
terse_malvolio 6y ago
An easy to miss improvement to the UI would be moving the leftmost upvote triangles on the 'comments' and 'from' pages a bit to the right to accommodate for mobile users . It's harder to click on something at the edge of the screen.
tux 6y ago
dark themed hacker news reader; https://zvoid.org/hn https://zvoid.org/hn
lopespm 6y ago
One more reference: HackerNews Daily, which I've published a couple of days ago: - Web page: https://lopespm.github.io/hackernews-daily https://lopespm.github.io/hackernews-daily - GitHub repository: https://github.com/lopespm/hackernews-daily https://github.com/lopespm/hackernews-daily - Blog article about its implementation: https://lopespm.github.io/2020/12/25/hackernews-daily.html https://lopespm.github.io/2020/12/25/hackernews-daily.html
MarkMc 6y ago
If anyone's interested, our students built an HN reader app: https://mclarentimes.com/ https://mclarentimes.com/ The cool thing is that users can crowdsource story subtitles and images. Plus it can remember what stories you've already seen.
brianzelip 6y ago
Got a new phone and my fave HN reader (http://hn.premii.com/ http://hn.premii.com/) is no longer available in app stores. Surprised and dismayed by the heavy use of favicons in the story feed in most of the current first page results in the ios app store. No thanks. What's dope about linked above app is the minimal rendering of the story metadata.
jerrygoyal 6y ago
I use materialistic app for Android. mainly because it provides widget showing top stories on homescreen
galfarragem 6y ago
HN "newspaper theme": https://www.wolfgangfaust.com/project/paper-hn/ https://www.wolfgangfaust.com/project/paper-hn/ Not listed in the article and was a recent ShowHN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669650)
gripfx 6y ago
For those looking for a relatively fast, mobile and dark mode friendly reader for HN, my pick is https://hn.svelte.dev/ https://hn.svelte.dev/ It is made with the Svelte JS framework
scns 6y ago
Check out the materialic app on android. Themes (solarized and others), the possibility to download comments for offline reading and more. It is the app use the most, yes i'm an infovore.
- scns 6y ago
  materialistic i meant.
xsc 6y ago
I've found Alexa to be not as accurate as Majestic Million https://majestic.com/reports/majestic-million https://majestic.com/reports/majestic-million
mfbx9da4 6y ago
Aggregates top youtube videos posted on HN https://hntv.crowdform.co.uk/hntv/ https://hntv.crowdform.co.uk/hntv/ built by yours truly.
mam2 6y ago
hckrnews.com hands down the better. no bullshit sorting by anything else than date posted. nice highlightinh and top 10 / 20 / 50 sorting options. 1 line per article
mmcnl 6y ago
I use hckrnews.com as my main entry for HN. It's very clean and gives you a nice overview of relevant topics.
vijay_nair 6y ago
I rolled out my own Firefox/Chrome web extension to tweak the native UI. Nothing drastic, just a gentle tweak of the CSS. Screenshots: https://twitter.com/vjk2005/status/1343664202288754689 https://twitter.com/vjk2005/status/1343664202288754689

158 points by lgats 6y ago

judge2020 6y ago

At first I thought this was going to be a list of the HN users that clicked the link but thankfully it’s not :)

This seems like the right place to ask: I remember some months ago there being a discussion about a dark mode for HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966 . It seemed at the time like dang was amenable to adding it, but nothing seemed to to come of it. Am I missing a setting somewhere? Dark mode is the only reason I use an external app for viewing HN.

wyclif 6y ago
Why won't HN offer dark mode?
- skissane 6y ago
  I think it is a matter of development time/resources. One issue is that HN is not really open source. Although there was an open source release years ago, the current code base is an evolution of that and closed. It then comes down to how much time/money Y Combinator is willing to invest in enhancing it, and I assume more essential stuff takes priority over nice-to-haves like dark mode. I think, ideally, the current version could be open sourced, and then people could contribute PRs to add stuff like dark mode. I think dang has said before that the reason why they don't do that, is they don't want to expose certain "secret sauce" (abuse/spam detection, voting code, etc), since if the algorithms were exposed people would exploit them. I guess one solution would be to split the code base into open core and closed plugins, open source the core and then keep the secret sauce in the closed plugins. But, I guess that would take time to carry out that refactoring, which comes back to the issue of limited development time/resources and what priorities that will be spent on.
  - tester34 6y ago
    Imma be kinda snarky here SV VCs struggle with once per long time peroid 500 HTML LoC page layout change?
    - tomcam 6y ago
      You sound pretty accomplished. I bet you could write a Hacker News clone in a weekend. I bet you could even attract an audience the same size in, what, a year or two? I’ll check back after this weekend and see how you’re doing.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      It's not that they struggle. HN's layout itself does a lot of work shaping the community here, so they understandably want to be careful about changing things.
- neilpanchal 6y ago
  As @dang said, I admire the HN philosophy - “Move slowly and preserve things.” There is no need for a dark mode. Just use a style extension. We are all tech savvy people here.
- chmaynard 6y ago
  Dan, Re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966 It's been four months since you agreed that dark mode for HN is a good idea. Any progress? If not, what is blocking you? Can I help? Craig -- We just don't have much dev time. Sorry for the delay. We'll get there. I appreciate the offer of help but we're not currently set up to accept contributions that way... Dan
square_usual 6y ago
You can use stylus (Firefox: [1], Chrome: [2]) to set a userstyle for HN. I have mine set to a lovely zenburn dark. [3] 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ 2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpeebahjckkjfobafhncgmne?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe... 3: https://github.com/UserStyles/hacker-news-zenburn-dark https://github.com/UserStyles/hacker-news-zenburn-dark
- oefrha 6y ago
  My extensions to hacker-news-zenburn-dark to make downvote state of comments visible: /** * The following colors are chosen with the linear map f(c): [#000000, #ffffff] -> [#dcdccc, #404040] where * f(#000000) = #dcdccc and f(#ffffff) = #404040. */ .c5a, .c5a *, .c5a a:link, .c5a a:visited { color:#a5a59b !important; } .c73, .c73 *, .c73 a:link, .c73 a:visited { color:#96968d !important; } .c82, .c82 *, .c82 a:link, .c82 a:visited { color:#8c8c85 !important; } .c88, .c88 *, .c88 a:link, .c88 a:visited { color:#898981 !important; } .c9c, .c9c *, .c9c a:link, .c9c a:visited { color:#7d7d76 !important; } .cae, .cae *, .cae a:link, .cae a:visited { color:#72726c !important; } .cbe, .cbe *, .cbe a:link, .cbe a:visited { color:#686864 !important; } .cce, .cce *, .cce a:link, .cce a:visited { color:#5e5e5b !important; } .cdd, .cdd *, .cdd a:link, .cdd a:visited { color:#555553 !important; }
- gala8y 6y ago
  Stylus Privacy Policy: "Unlike other similar extensions, we don't find you to be all that interesting. Your questionable browsing history should remain between you and the NSA. Stylus collects nothing. Period."
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Stylus is a surveillance-free fork of Stylish, created after the latter turned evil.
dartharva 6y ago
The DarkReader (darkreader.org) extension gives a beautiful dark theme to HN, just make sure you set the theme mode to "Static" instead of the default "Dynamic".
rarefied_tomato 6y ago
While useful, I'm averse to the complexity of such features. The steady devolution of Reddit's UX scares me. I also enjoy the offloaded ecosystem of sites like hn.algolia.com. It feels healthy for a hacker community to build these tailored readers.
- hutattedonmyarm 6y ago
  Dark mode can be done purely in CSS with media queries. I wouldn’t call it complex
  - rarefied_tomato 6y ago
    I see: prefers-color-scheme wouldn't bother me.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      I agree it shouldn’t be another HN setting when we already have a standard for it.
darekkay 6y ago
I wrote a userscript until a Dark Mode is supported natively: https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/blob/20b5858ff7a464fee11d0fc4d9a92ac87ba2ef28/userscripts/better-styles.user.js#L28 https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/blob/20b5858ff7a464...
ffpip 6y ago
Add to uBlock origin. To the "My filters" section. ycombinator.com##html:style(background-color: #3e3e42 !important) ycombinator.com###hnmain:style(background-color: #2E2E31 !important) ycombinator.com##.age:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.c00:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.comhead > a:style(color: #dedede !important) ycombinator.com##.comhead:style(color: #dedede !important) ycombinator.com##.hnuser:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.subtext > a:link:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.subtext > a:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.subtext:style(color: #ccc !important) ycombinator.com##.title > a:style(color: #dedede !important) ycombinator.com##a:link:style(color: #ccc !important) Source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23200038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23200038
- pugio 6y ago
  Thank you, that's very helpful for desktop, but I'm primarily interested in having this on my phone. There are many nice extensions for desktop browsers, but the only way to get dark mode on my phone (currently) is to use a 3rd party app.
  - ratherbefuddled 6y ago
    It works fine on Firefox mobile.
  - sexy_seedbox 6y ago
    If you're on Android, then Kiwi Browser's dark mode works great.
sydd 6y ago
All these custom stylesheets and extensions are nice, but still are a clunky workaround and sometimes a potential security issue
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Might sound strange, but when I "downgraded" my phone's display to IPS (as found on my iPhone 6s, and as opposed to AMOLED on my former Samsung phones), I had the impression to see HN in all its creamy-ness as intended for the first time in years, whereas on AMOLED with its tendency towards over-saturation, the light yellow background always seemed somewhat arbitrary and synthetic. This is in addition to the much better contrast and natural look of dark backgrounds possible on AMOLED, so clearly, while the problem is going to come back to hurt me, the desire for dark mode is driven by AMOLED. I wonder what CSS should do about this on top of prefers-color-scheme media queries; having to decide to optimize for AMOLED vs IPS seems odd when device color profiles have been a thing for ages.
Aeolun 6y ago
I think the plan was to make it dependent on the ‘prefer-dark’ css setting or something. I think the main problem is settling on a particular theme.

icy 6y ago

Missed http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ :')

watermelon59 6y ago
I love it that it doesn't load by design if the referer is HN. For anyone wondering: yeah, you have to copy and paste the link. Don't click it, it won't work. n-gate is my favorite way to consume HN.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Await the court-martial for violating the Prime Directive ;).

divbzero 6y ago

My three favorite HN readers are — [1]: https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ "hckr news" [2]: https://hackernewsletter.com/ https://hackernewsletter.com/ "Hacker Newsletter" [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front "HN’s daily front page" They offer good ways to browse HN posts on slower cadence.

smichel17 6y ago
It's the newsletter still active? The archive seems last updated in 2019.
- divbzero 6y ago
  The archive on the website looks stale but the newsletter is still active by email. The latest newsletter was Issue #534 emailed on 2020-12-19.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- duck 6y ago
  It is still active... I've just been lazy and haven't fix the archive yet.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    FYI, I subscribed and I like the format, but I will probably unsubscribe because every link goes through a tracking domain instead of directly to the article/comments :(

nikitaga 6y ago

There's also my old dog http://hnapp.com http://hnapp.com, and Dan Grossman's http://www.hnreplies.com/ http://www.hnreplies.com/ (I think it qualifies as "alternative UI")

cheeaun 6y ago

Nice to see hackerweb on the list :) A little self-promo here, I just released a new V2 of HackerWeb for iOS https://apps.apple.com/app/id1084209377 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1084209377 - it's still built with React Native, open-sourced https://github.com/cheeaun/hackerweb-native-2 https://github.com/cheeaun/hackerweb-native-2 with a really nice UI that I've designed, especially for comment threads. It'll be free until end of the year. Cheers.

rcarmo 6y ago
Still for iPhone only, I see :(
- cheeaun 6y ago
  There's the web and (older) Android version too :) https://hackerwebapp.com/ https://hackerwebapp.com/
  - rcarmo 6y ago
    I use an iPad and like the web version, but would love to have the new one...
tomcam 6y ago
Do you license the HN content or just pirate it?
- cheeaun 6y ago
  Not sure you mean, content is from the API https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API
  - tomcam 6y ago
    I’ll be damned! Didn’t know about the API. My apologies and I heartily encourage downvotes for my rudeness.

kaelig 6y ago

I made https://www.read.hn/ https://www.read.hn/, for users of Instapaper. Clicking a link to a story opens it in Instapaper. It's styled using my personal Instapaper theme, so reading HN feels like I'm on the same site whether I'm on the homepage or reading a story. (Optimized for mobile, no tracking/analytics, very lightweight, and open source)

Aeolun 6y ago
This looks very nice. Subscribed to instapaper and will try it a bit.

varbhat 6y ago

I am perfectly fine with main UI of HN , that is news.ycombinator.com . Although,i agree that some improvements can be made. One Pro of main UI is that it is simple and very fast without fancy moving parts. I like it a lot.

hliyan 6y ago
I was about to suggest a feature where we could collapse comment replies below a certain vote threshold but then decided against it. It's better to leave the responsibility of scanning through and deciding what to read on the reader themselves, rather than an algorithm. Which is where problems usually begins. At times it's a bit of a pain scanning and scrolling through reams of comments trying to find things I find valuable, but it's better than the alternative, I feel.
- tpxl 6y ago
  Having to expand every single comment in reddit threads is infuriating. The HN UI is just the right amount of information dense and readable for me.
  - aldanor 6y ago
    It's ok because HN is much smaller; on Reddit, there are posts with 20k+ comments - for those, thread collapsing kinda makes sense (which doesn't validate collapsing comment threads everywhere else though).
- 411111111111111 6y ago
  Comments already get marked as dead/hidden if there are too many downvotes I thought? You actually have to go into your profile and enable a checkpoint just to see them at all.
- jsinai 6y ago
  I agreed that it’s better than the alternative. Also the alternative has the risk of amplifying echo chamber viewpoints. And then there is the fundamental of how new would comments break the barrier of getting upvoted in the first place?

iansinnott 6y ago

Not sure hn.algolia.com counts as a reader. It's a great tool, but it just links back to this site as far as I've seen.

xgbi 6y ago

My personal favorite is https://hn.premii.com https://hn.premii.com It has an iOS app which is just a packaging of the web app, but I find the rendering just right.

brianzelip 6y ago
Thanks for this! I just got a new phone with latest ios, and my HN reader (this one) was the one app that didn’t get transferred because “it’s no longer available in the App Store”. Even the in-app about links lead to “not available anymore” in app stores. Wonder if there is at least a PWA under the hood...
- mfkp 6y ago
  Same thing on Android, it was removed from the play store. Luckily I had a copy of the .apk on my old phone and could copy it over. It's my main source of consuming and interacting with HN (including writing this comment).

smusamashah 6y ago

Is there a reader which shows all links in a thread? I like to collect links from HN and currently thinking of making a chrome extension for this. Later I plan to play with API to draw a graph/tree with a threads as nodes and see linked pages and threads.

jraph 6y ago
One idea for you then: I think it's not rare to see a link from a thread, or a related link, show up in its own submission soon after. Maybe linking those would be nice too.

dotmanish 6y ago

Happy user of Octal ( https://github.com/dangwu/Octal https://github.com/dangwu/Octal ) for iOS here.

allenleein 6y ago

I use Dracula theme and its delightful:) Feel free to use it: https://github.com/allenleein/hackernews-dracula https://github.com/allenleein/hackernews-dracula

webscout 6y ago

https://upstract.com https://upstract.com also has a section for HN, and then some...

rognjen 6y ago

I've been using the HN RSS for a long while. It works fine in your reader of choice. I am kind of disappointed with this submission though because I was expecting an analysis of the people who read HN, aka HN readers.

deleted 6y ago

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deleted 6y ago
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tonka3000 6y ago

I prefer https://raycast.com https://raycast.com on MacOS for the last couple of weeks. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4332171/97564988-5f2a3300-19dd-11eb-863b-005c1a15a6b2.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4332171/97564988-5...

AH4oFVbPT4f8 6y ago
How did you set this up within raycast ?

jshmrsn 6y ago

Since I have a bad habit of checking Reddit many times per day, I often arrive at HN via my subscription to r/hackernews

gala8y 6y ago

Little add-on for Firefox, which highlights newly added comments after page refresh on main HN site. Really useful. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-comment-highlight/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-c...

mrweasel 6y ago

I kinda miss quiethn.com, but that's a spam site now.

snickmy 6y ago
what was it about ?
- lgats 6y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20171001013212/https://quiethn.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171001013212/https://quiethn.c...
- mrweasel 6y ago
  It was just the headlines, no comments, no point, no nothing. Great if you just wanted to see what was new, but not get lost in the comments. It's a little dumb, I could just make my own clone in 30 minutes.

polote 6y ago

A funny way to get this list is to publish a post on HN, wait a few days and check the list of backlinks on Google console

qznc 6y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/ Over 50k subscribers on the subreddit.

miked85 6y ago

Ranked by Alexa popularity. How many HN readers are actually installing the Alexa plugin/extension?

npteljes 6y ago

I like to visit hckrnews.com first, because I can quickly see what the most engaged topics were. The good thing is that it's just an alternative main site, it doesn't take over the comments section.

freetonik 6y ago

Shameless plug, here's a "30 random good HN posts from the past"-reader I made just yesterday: https://thn.rakhim.org/ https://thn.rakhim.org/

sampsa 6y ago

I built an iOS app for my own specific preference: no clutter, opens links in reader mode and dark mode included. Settings can be changed from the iOS settings. Hope it’s the choice of somebody else as well: https://apps.apple.com/app/hakkeri-readable-hacker-news/id1115084104 https://apps.apple.com/app/hakkeri-readable-hacker-news/id11...

raydev 6y ago
How did you get past app review? I tried to ship a free HN reader with more features than this one and was told I didn't meet the minimum functionality requirements.

MrJagil 6y ago

I personally am longing for a HN-app that copies the UI/UX exactly. Down to a T. The reason is, whenever I use Safari for consumption I find myself suddenly surfing endlessly and needlessly.

antouank 6y ago

Just curious, does any of those alternative readers let you log in and upvote or comment, etc? PS I've created https://hack.ernews.info https://hack.ernews.info, and was trying out the authentication part. Got upvoting to work for now.

terse_malvolio 6y ago

An easy to miss improvement to the UI would be moving the leftmost upvote triangles on the 'comments' and 'from' pages a bit to the right to accommodate for mobile users . It's harder to click on something at the edge of the screen.

tux 6y ago

dark themed hacker news reader; https://zvoid.org/hn https://zvoid.org/hn

lopespm 6y ago

One more reference: HackerNews Daily, which I've published a couple of days ago: - Web page: https://lopespm.github.io/hackernews-daily https://lopespm.github.io/hackernews-daily - GitHub repository: https://github.com/lopespm/hackernews-daily https://github.com/lopespm/hackernews-daily - Blog article about its implementation: https://lopespm.github.io/2020/12/25/hackernews-daily.html https://lopespm.github.io/2020/12/25/hackernews-daily.html

MarkMc 6y ago

If anyone's interested, our students built an HN reader app: https://mclarentimes.com/ https://mclarentimes.com/ The cool thing is that users can crowdsource story subtitles and images. Plus it can remember what stories you've already seen.

brianzelip 6y ago

Got a new phone and my fave HN reader (http://hn.premii.com/ http://hn.premii.com/) is no longer available in app stores. Surprised and dismayed by the heavy use of favicons in the story feed in most of the current first page results in the ios app store. No thanks. What's dope about linked above app is the minimal rendering of the story metadata.

jerrygoyal 6y ago

I use materialistic app for Android. mainly because it provides widget showing top stories on homescreen

galfarragem 6y ago

HN "newspaper theme": https://www.wolfgangfaust.com/project/paper-hn/ https://www.wolfgangfaust.com/project/paper-hn/ Not listed in the article and was a recent ShowHN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669650)

gripfx 6y ago

For those looking for a relatively fast, mobile and dark mode friendly reader for HN, my pick is https://hn.svelte.dev/ https://hn.svelte.dev/ It is made with the Svelte JS framework

scns 6y ago

Check out the materialic app on android. Themes (solarized and others), the possibility to download comments for offline reading and more. It is the app use the most, yes i'm an infovore.

scns 6y ago
materialistic i meant.

xsc 6y ago

I've found Alexa to be not as accurate as Majestic Million https://majestic.com/reports/majestic-million https://majestic.com/reports/majestic-million

mfbx9da4 6y ago

Aggregates top youtube videos posted on HN https://hntv.crowdform.co.uk/hntv/ https://hntv.crowdform.co.uk/hntv/ built by yours truly.

mam2 6y ago

hckrnews.com hands down the better. no bullshit sorting by anything else than date posted. nice highlightinh and top 10 / 20 / 50 sorting options. 1 line per article

mmcnl 6y ago

I use hckrnews.com as my main entry for HN. It's very clean and gives you a nice overview of relevant topics.

vijay_nair 6y ago

I rolled out my own Firefox/Chrome web extension to tweak the native UI. Nothing drastic, just a gentle tweak of the CSS. Screenshots: https://twitter.com/vjk2005/status/1343664202288754689 https://twitter.com/vjk2005/status/1343664202288754689