13 ms·
Show HN: I made a Hacker News for the automotive industry
- trizoza 5y agoHi all, I made this project to help myself stay up to date with automotive industry because I love cars and anything related to them. It gathers the latest automotive news from more than 20 auto portals. Allows users to submit articles, comment, and upvote. I got quite literally inspired by HN and was mindblown why such a thing does not exist for automotive industry. Also users can subscribe to a newsletter that delivers top 10 articles of the week every Monday morning. Thank you in advance for any feedback! And happy to reply to any questions. Peter
- Svip 5y agoIf some of them are aggregated, while others are submitted, it is not clear to me to tell them apart, nor where an aggregated story came from. One just says "Submitted by Carol", but I cannot click on the name to learn anything more. I also notice you hotlink all the images, you might want to contemplate re-hosting the images yourself, or abandon the images altogether.
- trizoza 5y agoHi, thanks for the feedback. In the long term, you will be able to click and see the user behind the submission. However it's still in TODO column atm. But will def add it as this feedback is so valid. Good shout about splitting the automated/submitted content.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoI think I like the autosubmissions, sometimes it's silly that a story HN will definitely discuss has to be found and submitted by someone. There are certain sites one could arguably auto-submit to HN, though HN is popular enough to just not need it. Do make it clear which are auto-submitted though.
- trizoza 5y agoWill do.
- tobr 5y agoCongratulations on shipping a thing! I have to say though, creating a place to submit links and invite or comment doesn’t mean it’s “a Hacker News for X” - what makes HN what it is is the community. Do you have any thoughts on how you could build a community around this project?
- trizoza 5y agoHi and thanks a lot. I 100% agree with you on the community factor - that was the main motivation behind my project - however to get your hobby project up and running I needed to bring some content in first - therefore the automation. I've reached out to all my peers (i'm ex-automotive engineer) and they've started using it - some of them on daily basis. However once I've reached my network limits - I've started launching to relevant communities - PistonHeads, reddit/r/AutomotiveEngineering, product hunt and now HN. I am hoping to that there will be a cross-section of users that love cars and will stick and start posting content themselves.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoIt seems like a neat idea, I hope it works! I'm not sure I'd say it's "HN for ..." though. The automated(?) news aggregation and newsletter features seem pretty different from HN's Spartan style and entirely user-submitted content.
- trizoza 5y agoHi, thx! The great aspect of HN, as you say and for me is also the community curation of relevant content. I've automated the inputs of the most popular automotive portals to get in some initial content. However the community - by clicking, sharing, commenting then decides which articles make it to the top. And of course they can submit their own articles - if it gets enough traction - I will consider switching of the popular.
- busterarm 5y agoA couple of former TTAC editors are active users here on HN. Will be interesting to see their feedback.
- trizoza 5y agoThat would be absolutely amazing.
- tiotempestade 5y agoHey Peter, mind if I embed the feed in my automobile marketplace site? :)
- trizoza 5y agoWe could definitely work towards that!
- the_duke 5y agoAll the top stories seem very consumer oriented, not for professionals in the industry. From a cursory glance it seems more like a "car enthusiast" news site rather than a place for industry discussion.
- frontiersummit 5y agoI've spent much of my career in the auto industry (Tier 1 supplier), and I couldn't agree more. I'm even a "car guy," but I could care less about exotic cars, which most of what appears on autonews.io.
- Balgair 5y agoAside: What are good car sites?
- trizoza 5y agoautonews.io ;)
- yitchelle 5y agoSo true. I'm with a Tier 1 for many years, and exotic cars are meh. I would prefer to see items like advancement in tyre technology, or improvements in passenger safety, or reduction in energy consumption.
- trizoza 5y agoThanks guys! Will be addressed.
- frongpik 5y agoThe pressure to make money out of it will turn your forum into what could be another subreddit. To repeat HN you'd need to remove pictures (they invoke emotions and attract unsophisticated audience) and all the marketing fluff, hire a team of people who deal with autos on day to day basis (mechanics, salesmen, dealship owners, pro racers, stars like the ex Top Gear team) and advertise everywhere that here's the no bs forum about autos. Wait for 10 years and you'll get a critical mass of audience. You'd still have to pay expensive mods. On top of that you'll have to figure a non-ads business model to support the forum.
- gnicholas 5y agoLots of people here are saying the UI and images detract from the site. I think it is possible that people who are into cars are different than people who are into hackery, and that perhaps this criticism should be discarded.
- spyke112 5y agoOne of the things HN gets right is in my opinion the classic basic design. I wish you would have recreated that.
- trizoza 5y agoThanks for the feedback. The main reason why I went for the combination of pictures and text was that many car enthusiast like the visual aspect of cars and therefore I kept the images as well.
- systemvoltage 5y agoFor what's its worth - Circular images are a fad created for avatars (pictures of people with their heads fitting inside the circle). You're showing images embedded in the article and IMO should be rectangular.
- GloriousKoji 5y agoI think the thumbnails add too much white space between headlines and doesn't actually show enough to be useful. Like if there's a press release of a new model or spy photos, I want to see all the pictures from all angles and not a zoomed in crop of a singular headlight. As of right now I'm only see 3 thumbnails of the top 10 with a picture of a vehicle. Also (old.)reddit already does the small thumbnail and headline thing. I like the hackernews layout for its information density.
- spdionis 5y ago
- asimjalis 5y agoIs there a list of HN for X somewhere?
- trizoza 5y ago:D:D:D probably yes
- ibraheemdev 5y agoYup :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26868865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26868865
- amitmahbubani 5y agoTech and related content is generally global. Auto news on the other hand is usually localized, and locally relevant.
- trizoza 5y agoHi, yeah, that's a very good point. Have not considered this fact. Hmmm...
- frozencell 5y agoMaybe something automobile in the VR could be new.
- verall 5y agoThis might seem facetious, but the cookie warning really threw me off. It doesn't really matter, I canbjust click past it, but instantly in my head: "This isn't HN for anything. Some marketing something or other I guess..." I think, for a dedicated/techy crowd, little things like a cookie warning mean a lot. To me it screams crap. I can't think of a single website I use enjoy using regularly that included a cookie warning. I think Reddit added a cookie warning when their UI went to shit.
- trizoza 5y agoHi, I honestly hate the cookie banner myself - that's why I made it as much invisible as possible. But I'm using Google's Firebase for user authentication and therefore it uses cookies. I also store your choice of theme dark/light into a cookie so it's there for you next time. I believe that's why I have to have the banner there. Or am I wrong?
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoYou probably shouldn't backend on a Google service if you value your users' privacy. The theme cookie is easier to solve: Use CSS media preferences instead and use people's browser settings to choose it. That being said, cookie warnings may not be necessary if you aren't storing anything personally identifiable.
- ALittleLight 5y agoPer my understanding of GDPR you only need the cookie warning for cookies unrelated to your site's fundamental operation. Admittedly, I'm not a lawyer and I've not really liked too closely at it, but I don't think you need a warning just because you use a cookie.
- crazypython 5y agoFirebase is easy to set up but pricey to scale and hard to migrate off of.
- fakedang 5y ago
- Piisamirotta 5y agoCookie popup. Loading spinner. Not enough Hacker News for me :)
- trizoza 5y agoRoger that :)
- holoduke 5y agoThe reason I use HN is because it is simple. Nothing fancy. Just text. Copy that please. And please add more indepth tech links. Not just company press release links
- grawprog 5y agoNot a big fan of the use of space compared to hn. On hn on mobile I can clearly see the headlines for 13 stories, on the automotive one, I get 6, meaning i have to scroll a whole page just to see as many stories as I can at a glance on hn. With one quick scroll, i can see an entire hn page, to get to the bottom of autonews I had to scroll 5 times and scroll past an annoying subscribe bar placed in the middle. I don't really feel like it captures hn's ease of use and simplicity.
- aero- 5y agodude you would love tiktok. you get one video per page.
- trizoza 5y agoThanks, I was actually exactly thinking the same when I was comparing autonews.io vs HN. But I would have to compromise the images if I wanted to make it more concise, and I've decided not to.
- jvalencia 5y agoYou can keep the images, but just reduce all the white space. Also, I'd get rid of the cookie banner, as I didn't see cookies?
- trizoza 5y agoThanks, someone else mentioned the cookies as well. Will have a look into whether I can remove that, as I hate the consent myself.
- grawprog 5y agoI don't think the images are a problem. Like the other commenter said i think it's the use of whitespace. The story feed seems quite narrow compared to hn. There's lots of deadspace to either side. I think you could increase the usage of space while not compromising on the images. Please too, put the subscribe thing at the bottom of the page, not the middle. That just reminded me of a midpage banner add. It disrupted the reading flow very obviously. It's a terrible spot for it.
- awestroke 5y agoBut did you write it in a shitty homemade lisp?
- trizoza 5y agoHehehe, no, it's Next.js/React/TypeScript - why lisp? :D
- jhgb 5y agoBecause then it's not proper "Hacker News for X", of course! /jk (Although it has to be said that HN's rejection of complexity -- the exact opposite of your approach of embracing it with all those javascripty thingies -- does have something going for it.)
- trizoza 5y agoGot you! ;) HN for X in terms of functionality, def not in terms of lightweight execution :)
- sumthinprofound 5y agoan RSS feed would be super great.
- trizoza 5y agoNoted.
- ffpip 5y agoGreat website, you seemed to have worked hard on it. Some feedback if you don't mind it. 1. How about moving the domain of the article posted beside the post title (like HN)? This maintains the flow of reading. I read the post title and then I can see the source of the article on it's right. 2. You seem to have a separate URL for each post ( EG: https://autonews.io/article/99522953-788c-446f-a706-cd26e2c38f8e https://autonews.io/article/99522953-788c-446f-a706-cd26e2c3...) but I couldn't find any way of accessing an individual post's URL from the front page. Had to dig into the HTML. Maybe clicking on the timestamp copies the post link or takes you to the individual post's URL? 3. Dark mode toggle is very confusing (https://i.imgur.com/V0MrNlA.png https://i.imgur.com/V0MrNlA.png). Don't switch the icon after each toggle. Put an icon (indicating dark or light mode) outside the toggle and then let users change based on that (https://i.imgur.com/1wyE6si.png https://i.imgur.com/1wyE6si.png) . 4. Don't automatically open links in a new tab. HN doesn't do that. Let users ctrl+click if they want to open it in new tab if they want to.
- trizoza 5y agoHi, thanks for that! Noted.
- ALittleLight 5y agoFiling a bug report: 1. Unauthenticated: try to add comment. 2. Error that you need an account to comment. 3. Create account 4. Attempt to submit the comment typed in one. Expected: Comment submitted successfully. Actual: Something went wrong.
- trizoza 5y agoThanks, will be addressed!
- mewmew 5y agoPerhaps I'm the wrong audience, so feel free to disregard this feedback :) I personally use Hacker News without JavaScript, and was expecting/hoping the same would work for autonews. But, alas. It gets stuck at "Loading..." Still, wish you all the best with autonews, and hope you can build a tailored community of automotive enthusiasts. Cheers, Robin
- trizoza 5y agoThanks Robin. I have not even thought of running it without JS. Might consider in future. And thanks again! Hopefully it finds its audience.
- esturk 5y agoWhat's are you doing differently versus r/cars over at reddit which already has over 2.3 million subs in their community?
- trizoza 5y agoThere definitely is an overlap, big one. I built it for this reason: I am a automotive engineer. I come to work in the morning, make myself a coffee and open autonews.io, click on 2-3 articles that interest me, read them, done with my coffee, ready to work, I'm up to date with latest news in industry - so maybe the combination of news feed plus community submitted articles is different. Hope it is!
- mod 5y agoNot op, but seems like he's (potentially) creating a focused, niche community, maybe with better moderation. Or maybe he's going for the exact same thing. There's no reason to differentiate from what one subreddit does. Many of us don't like reddit.
- trizoza 5y agothx
- tmh88j 5y ago/r/cars focuses primarily on performance ICE vehicles, specifically sports cars and some offroading. It seems like most subjects on OP's site cater towards EV's, hybrids and general non-enthusiast subjects. As a huge performance car enthusiast, there were only a couple links within the past few days that were of interest to me.
- trizoza 5y agohi, yeah, that's been a great feedback, few other people were asking for Formula1 and other racing content. Will be brought soon.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
- asimjalis 5y agoI like the site and the layout.
- trizoza 5y agoThanks!
- tw600040 5y agoIs there a HN for finance?
- peanut_worm 5y agoI don’t see how it is very similar to HN beyond being a news aggregator.
- criddell 5y agoThey certainly don't have the same moderation abilities: https://autonews.io/article/99522953-788c-446f-a706-cd26e2c38f8e https://autonews.io/article/99522953-788c-446f-a706-cd26e2c3... Edit: They fixed it! Nice.
- trizoza 5y agoDid not absolutely think of trolls arrival. Disabled comments for now. Will allow again soon. just need to figure out the best way.
- nielsbot 5y agoMakes me wonder about hacker news having tags/categories. You can ignore them (they're just metadata) but also filter by them if you choose. (show me "automotive" posts)
- seumars 5y agoGet ready for all the comments about the design from non-designers
- p1necone 5y agoI'm not sure why being a designer is necessary to criticize UX, unless it's UX intended for designers. You don't only read restaurant reviews from restaurant owners, or movie reviews from filmmakers, or car reviews from automotive engineers do you?
- Judgmentality 5y agoFor the same reasons being a coder isn't necessary to criticize code. Anybody can do it, but chances are your opinions are a lot less informed than you realize.
- booleandilemma 5y agoI think even a lowly non-designer is capable of saying whether a website is trash or not, and I don’t think the same is true for code at all.
- ALittleLight 5y agoIt depends. If you don't know how to code and you're commenting on language or framework choice (e.g. "it's electron therefore bad") or something like that, then your opinion is probably invalid. On the other hand, if you're comment is something like "This app doesn't work like I want" then it really doesn't matter if you have the slightest idea how to implement what you want. Likewise, a non-designer offering opinions on design philosophy or alternate styles is probably pretty useless. A non-designer saying the thing is awkward/ugly/confusing/whatever is informative though.
- p1necone 5y agoThis isn't a great comparison. The only people that need to read (and know how to read) code are coders. A non-coder can't criticize code. This is not the same for UX (or restaurants, films or cars from my other example) as these are things that everyone interacts with and understands to some extent despite not doing so in a professional capacity.
- mcchew 5y agoI work at an automotive-related tech firm so in principle this looks great and useful. I do think the design could be simpler, more like old reddit or HN, to maximize the amount of information presented to the user. There also appears to be a moderation problem, especially on the current top post, so I can't really share it with colleagues yet ;)
- LordDragonfang 5y agoFor those viewing this in the future after this has (hopefully) been fixed, it's one user spamming comments with exactly the slur you'd expect a dozen times.
- trizoza 5y agoCommenting had to be disabled temporarily.
- garyrob 5y agoI like it and, to tell the truth, I may end up reading it rather than subscribing to Motor Trend, the way I no longer feel a need to get science magazines because of r/Science!
- trizoza 5y agoThank you!
- chaosbutters314 5y agogreat idea, remove the thumbnails, they serve no purpose. If you want a thumbnail, make it topic related. So like a politics/legislation thumbnail, new product thumbnail, etc that way it is easy to determine what the story relates too. I guess it'd be equivalent to flair on reddit
- bdamm 5y agoThis site (cool intent, good luck) highlights what HN does really well, because this site doesn't go deep on a refined textual experience. HN has a very simple user experience, deep content, and yet remarkably little abuse or junk content. There must be a great deal going on behind the scenes for this clean look and feel, free of abuse. How are bots suppressed? How are abusive users and content avoided? Insight into what that looks like would be most appreciated!
- trizoza 5y agoThat's what I'm trying to figure out at the moment. Want to bring commenting back asap, but need to come up with clever way to block trolls...maybe a time window between registration and allowance of commenting + some sort of minimum karma - like you'd have to click on certain number of articles before you can comment. First thoughts. Will read up a bit on it.
- crazypython 5y agoGood luck having automotive engineers read it!
- pryelluw 5y agoSo r/cars ? What’s different?
- dragonwriter 5y agoGratuitous images by each story, slow enough to load that it benefits from a cutesy loading spinner, cookies for tailored marketing, email signup box after the 10th story, fat banner that uses the hamburger menu icon but doesn’t trust it to be communicative enough so also has “Menu” in text on the button... That’s...not a Hacker News for X.
- deepfriedbits 5y agoI think you make very good points but wonder if you could have softened the delivery a bit.
- frongpik 5y agoWhy? It's a great delivery. It may sound harsh only to our truth-allergic world of big corps.
- deepfriedbits 5y agoEh you can say as much in a more delicate way – deliver every one of those points. I’m not going to feel bad for thinking we can all be nicer to each other.
- FabiansMustDie 5y agoNiceness does nothing but waste emotional energy to please another. There's no reason for it, except personal preference.
- Fats 5y agoI fail to see the connection to the "big corps" here, nor being allergic to the truth. This is about being nicer, as a human being. Becoming more empathetic towards a person who is showing their product for the world to see for the first time. Of course it may have perceived flaws. Do you choose to beat the person for doing it that way, or do you want to offer gentle advice in order to help them? The motive behind the comment is hidden in its delivery. You can say your truth, all of it - but you can say it in a nice way or in a shitty way. How you say it will define you.
- seirim 5y agoCan I ride your coattails and introduce a "Hacker news" we made just for Cybersecurity?: https://cyber.report/ https://cyber.report/
- mod 5y agoAs long as we can give you some honest feedback: your extremely low contrast color choices make this a nightmare to read. Otherwise, I think it's a lot truer to "HN for X" than OP.
- seirim 5y agoOk, we didn't hear that input before so thank you we will see how to improve that. See in the top right icons there is a 'moon' that turns on a night time mode, might be helpful. I just ran our site through the Web Accessibility contrast checker at webaim.org to compare the headlines (what we think people want to scan and focus on) to the background. The contrast score is a very high and passing 14.5/1 ratio. We make the micro text more subdued on purpose to make scanning the headlines easier.
- mkoryak 5y agoCompare your site with hn on "bedtime mode" in android 11. It's the mode that makes the screen grayscale. In fact I'm sure you can emulate it. Some text on your site is too light, and the contrast is meh. Otherwise, nice site, I'll be sure to check it out again in color tomorrow :)
- seirim 5y agook thank you we'll check that. I do think our night time styling could be darker, for sure. I use Dark Reader usually for most sites and appreciate sites not being too bright in the eyes at the wrong times.
- XCSme 5y agoWhy does it say a post has 12 comments, but when I open it it has 0? Or from 14 comments it has only 2?
- mod 5y agoSome were moderated. The main page doesn't seem to get the post-count data from the same place as the actual comment view (which has a correct count). He's either tallying the count in a column (which is wrong after moderation), or caching the main page.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- whalesalad 5y agoThe r/cars subreddit is great for this and has a massive/very active community.
- frontiersummit 5y agoYou might want to consider that autonews.com is the url of Automotive News, a widely-read trade publication from Crain Communications. (I get access to it as I work for a Tier-1 automotive supplier). IANAL, but you probably will get in hot water if you keep using autonews.io, even non-commercially. (trademark infringement, cyber-squatting, and the like) (edit:sp)
- trizoza 5y agoHmmm, thanks, that's a very good comment. I went for having autonews.io as a brand literally both autonews and io.
- layer8 5y agoThe comment counts on the front page are not consistent with the number of comments shown in the individual threads.
- blt 5y agoThe initial posts seem mostly be either 1) reviews, 2) "wrapper articles" for auto manufacturers' press releases, or 3) articles about industry-relevant public policy. These are all appropriate for a HN-like community, but I was expecting to see a lot more highly technical articles too. Topics like engine designs, control systems, manufacturing processes, etc., written by engineers. I guess a lot of the most current and interesting information about those topics stays locked within auto manufacturers.
- daniellarusso 5y ago...or posted on HN.
- tmh88j 5y ago> I was expecting to see a lot more highly technical articles too. Topics like engine designs, control systems, manufacturing processes, etc., written by engineers. The youtube channel Engineering Explained is probably as close to that as you'll get. It's mostly about technology already available though, not much content on future tech still in the R&D phase. https://www.youtube.com/user/EngineeringExplained/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/EngineeringExplained/videos
- daniellarusso 5y agoI work for a SaaS in the auto industry that is a B2B service for dealerships. So, I was obviously interested, but this is not the content I expected. I would not categorize it as auto industry news, more like auto consumer news. I was hoping for content similar to the articles in moderndealership.com, or ‘Dealer News Magazine’. More business-side, less enthusiast.
- scrose 5y agoA couple of things I really think would help: The password reset and login form leaks account info in the network response. You should return the same network response regardless of whether the user exists in the DB, instead of relying on the UI to communicate that. Logging into your site sends back the full account profile object, including the password 'hash', which appears to just be a Base64 encoded string. Fortunately the Firebase API redacts that field so the decoded string is just 'REDACTED', but that's not a good thing to rely on, and I hope the password is actually encrypted behind the scenes.. Both of these are unfortunately common mistakes you see even on more well known sites. Goodluck with everything.
- trizoza 5y agoHi thanks for that. I'm using the Firebase Auth out of the box, basically just methods like - fb.login(), fb.logout(), was not even thinking that Firebase could be insecure tbh.
- sss111 5y agoHi, Could you help me replicate this on my machine. Should I use the developer console to check all network responses?
- Ceezy 5y agoI'm still gonna say congratulation!!! But I think executing a fairly "easy" project such as hacker news for X. And not providing key (UI) features of hackernews seems a bit misleading. Specifically presenting to an audience of software engineers. People should be able to connect from their car I guess. I'm not sure it would work as is. HN would. It's just the beginning, post the update.
- sss111 5y agoYour website leaks account info and password hashes!
- trizoza 5y agoCould you point me how?
- surround 5y agoThe top submission says it has 14 comments, but then you click on it and it only has three. I also find it hard to believe that submissions on this site are already accumulating >700 points, surpassing most HN submissions. On top of that, there are few, if any, comments for every upvote. One submission has 728 points but no comments?
- Balgair 5y agoIf you read that particular thread, you'll see that the only real comment is complaining about the use of a word that starts with the letter after M and before O. I think that some trolls have gotten to the site already.
- trizoza 5y agoYeah, I'm sorry about that. Was not ready for it. Had to disable commenting completely. Will be fixed asap.
- sideproject 5y agoFor anyone who are interested, I created a small project awhile ago called HelloBox to help those who want to create "HackerNews for XYZ". https://www.hellobox.co https://www.hellobox.co
- seirim 5y agoThat looks very interesting, is there a demo or live site using it anywhere? I don't see one or can't find one, thank you.
- ivan1783 5y agoDoes not seem to contain much "industry" news but rather "consumer" news. I am in industry and working on those cars, they are done and off of my desk 2 years before the public even sees them, its all just history for me...Industry news should talk about things like the current µ-chip shortage, sales, regulations, engineering, etc.
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoWhat site do you actually use for auto industry? I find that outside of technology and specifically software - everything is just consumer news and detail-less blurbs. It would be fascinating to read the HN equivalent of another topic.
- ivan1783 5y agoI've been looking for something like this myself for years. I would love to have a HN for electronics and automotive. Problem is both of those industries are quite closed and do not have large groups of their participants online, as with SW. I get industry news internally from our organization, there is unfortunately no online source for it.
- trizoza 5y agoHi Ivan, will definitely add more industry sources as I 100% agree with your point!
- neillyons 5y agoThe https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs source is available on github https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters if anyone wants to create a similar HN community around a different industry.
- sturza 5y agoNo rss?
- numlock86 5y agoWeird. When I visit HN I can see all posts from the front page without scrolling and read through the titles. On this page however I could barely see the first eight entries. Also there's a loading spinner for almost two seconds and multiple large image requests (some are really huge!) just to be displayed as a small circle. Ok? 11.7 MB for the front page. "Nice".
- ElectricMind 5y ago+1 for your effort. -1 for "look and feel"- I mean it is colory. It should be boring like HN so only content shines :)
- ryankrage77 5y agoIf I disable JavaScript the site doesn't work.
- millzlane 5y agoConsider the HN theme. https://imgur.com/a/Njn5tz5 https://imgur.com/a/Njn5tz5
- kokanator 5y agoFrom a personal perspective I would simply like to see more listings on a single page.
- trizoza 5y agonoted.
- betimsl 5y agoWould you be so kind to provide a RSS?