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"Hacker News" for retro computing and gaming
- nxobject 3y agoAnother reason that this resource is amazing: a lot of retro work/reverse-engineering etc. is done in communities for different platforms + architectures. Some cross-pollination would be fantastic.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoThis looks bad on mobile and has the classic “desktop zoomed out view”. Looks like it must be missing the correct HTML meta properties. Should be an easy fix.
- jgrahamc 3y agoYeah, I know. I'll get round to making it look good on mobile.
- ksherlock 3y agoIt works over HTTP (no S) so it's also usable on retro devices. Nice.
- Quinzel 3y agoI love it!
- dsco 3y agoIt would be nice with a mobile adapted version. theres a lot of low hanging fruit you can improve if you’re forking the original HN GUI. Good work!
- jgrahamc 3y agoYes. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37888305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37888305
- pflenker 3y agoLove the idea! However, it seems that you’re running a non-mobile friendly version of the hacker news design. Making it responsive would be greatly appreciated!
- jgrahamc 3y agoYeah. I need to work on the mobile version. Just haven't had time. An TBH I know little about responsive design. Where should I start? It's currently set up on a VPS running news.arc in a screen session connected to the Internet via Cloudflare Tunnel. If it falls over while I'm out today... sorry!
- cocoflunchy 3y agoMaybe you can just reuse the css from news.ycombinator.com? I don't know how much the code has drifted compared to the open source version. See https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css, specifically the @media parts
- joshspankit 3y ago> Where should I start? Use @media queries to modify the CSS rules. The bare-bones approach is a breakpoint around 1024 width where everything below is 100% width (with a small margin/padding if you like). That way smaller tablets and phones have a decent experience without horizontal scrollbars.
- jgrahamc 3y agoThank you!
- keybpo 3y agothe rss feed includes some garbage on the link to the comments. it seems it adds `item` before the `/` which renders the url invalid. eg https://twostopbits.comitem/?id=61 https://twostopbits.comitem/?id=61 but https://twostopbits.com/item?id=61 https://twostopbits.com/item?id=61 works fine
- dosk 3y ago1) nice agregator but do you remember on "https://hardwary.com/ https://hardwary.com/" also HN clone after short time is death... 2) Why Retro Text only webpage require news.js :-( not for retrobrowsers....
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Rochus 3y agoGreat. It's a good idea to have a HN-like platform with a narrower focus. Another idea would be to add focus areas to HN itself, maybe similar to subreddits. When I currently scan the "new" pages, I find less than 3% of the posts interesting.
- hnlmorg 3y agoPersonally I like the fact that some days I find very little of interest. It keeps me focused. Sometimes there can be too much content in our daily lives.
- Rochus 3y agoWell, then just don't look at it and focus on other things; that's what I do; but when I then come back later it's practically impossible to keep up and scan the whole stuff just to find the very few interesting posts; it would be much more efficient (with a positive effect on the ability to concentrate on the essential things) to just scan a pre-selected focus area.
- MrGilbert 3y agoI love it the way it is. If I miss out on an interesting story, so be it. But having all the other stories in between helps me looking left or right. I might not be knee deep into genomics, but that one article could just be interesting. I prefer that over tailored content. That’s what I use reddit is for.
- galangalalgol 3y agoYou don't need to sub-divide areas of endeavor. You could have all research, vs all practice, and maybe a place to stuff things that will cause political engagement and heated discussion? I dunno, /. did that and the proliferation of flame-bait stories still killed the site for me.
- hnlmorg 3y agoSometimes I want a 5 minute distraction without my FOMO (fear of missing out) kicking in on an article I might have missed. Anyways, I’m not saying your request is unreasonable. Just offering a counter perspective.
- jgrahamc 3y agoWould love to hear what enhancements retro folks would like. The one thing I plan to add shortly is tags so that it's possible to filter by say 6502 or c64 or zelda or ...
- suprjami 3y agoFill in title field from URL, it isn't clear from the submit page if this is already a feature or not Mobile CSS
- Rochus 3y agoEmail notification on responses is very useful; for HN I have to use http://www.hnreplies.com/ http://www.hnreplies.com/ for this.
- criddell 3y agoI'd vote against that. You end up with two people going back and forth which usually isn't great for everybody else. I really like the HN model. It encourages you to say what you are going to say and get out of the thread. If you do need or want to see the responses, you can do that easily enough by looking at your own comments. A little friction here is a good thing IMHO. It seems like a lot of the suggestions here would turn it into something more like Reddit. That already exists. No point in recreating it.
- celso 3y agoOr minitel...
- RetroTechie 3y agoLove the concept! Let's hope it attracts some audience. Btw: seems to work when you drop the /news at the end (just the site name). Perhaps make that a permanent feature? (unless you plan to have other content on that site of course). Or use a subdomain like HN does.
- cryo 3y agoLove it, just earned a spot in my bookmark toolbar.
- i_am_a_peasant 3y agosame
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago(tangent) as you are running this on a copy of Arc, is Arc still under development ? Or is that Bel ? My little schemer book is only two down in my book pile by my bed and so I was wondering ...
- cinntaile 3y agoI wonder if it would be interesting to make a blog that looks like the HN UI. Then when you click a link it shows the full article first rather than the comment thread. It's a nice minimalistic design imo.
- joshspankit 3y agoI use an RSS reader and see the title, the link to the article, and the link to the comment thread. This is currently my favourite way to read HN and I think there’s benefit to having both be only one click away
- sideproject 3y ago[dead]
- habibur 3y agoThe secret to Hacker News is that someone is paying for a full time admin years after years, without displaying 3rd party ads. Check if you can do that too.
- tester756 3y agoYou make it sound as if that was goodwill, but there's money in that, I believe. I'm not saying that the money is full reason, but at least partial.
- whywhywouldyou 3y agoSeems like this idea is well within the capability of one person to run and moderate it for free / fun in their spare time.
- bookofjoe 3y agoI believe this to be erroneous. Read this New Yorker profile of dang: https://archive.ph/czYVG https://archive.ph/czYVG "... for free/fun in their spare time."?
- qingcharles 3y agoMy respect for dang is enormous. I would love a peek behind the curtain. I have no idea how this site maintains the quality it does. I see only a fraction of the work Dan does and I can only think he lives in some weird quantum bubble where he has 489 hours in every day.
- MLH6ft1 3y agoI built HN for law using Python. At first it was quite slow, but after doing some tweaks, it loads just as fast as HN. Check it out: https://courtroom.sixftone-mlh.repl.co/ https://courtroom.sixftone-mlh.repl.co/
- sideproject 3y ago[dead]
- linker3000 3y agoMy initial reaction is that this is yet another place in a growing list for retro stuff, and many of the very active retro people are already sharing news and interesting links on Reddit, Xitter, Bluesky and the Fediverse; for example, I see Ken Shirriff is well represented on OP's site, but I am following him and others, and converse directly with them, on the socials anyway. The saving grace is that, as an aggregator, there's an rss feed so the site contents can come my way rather than needing to go have a looksee, however I am more likely to comment elsewhere where I have an established account rather than create yet another one to use and manage for yet another site to visit.
- sureglymop 3y agoIdea: what if we had a "federated" network of hacker news like sites based on ActivityPub? I understand that there are already federated reddit clones but I think this may be a cool project to learn more about ActivityPub.
- rewmie 3y ago> Idea: what if we had a "federated" network of hacker news like sites based on ActivityPub? HackerNews is already a news aggregation service, just like Reddit, countless other Reddit clones, lobste.rs, and most fediverse platforms. Just drop by one of the many Lemmy servers and create a community. There's no need to overcomplicate things. You can even create and manage your own instance if that's your thing.
- rewmie 3y ago> Just drop by one of the many Lemmy servers and create a community. I checked and there's already a retro gaming community in Lemmy. https://lemmy.world/c/retrogaming https://lemmy.world/c/retrogaming
- sureglymop 3y agoYou may have missed the last sentence of my comment. I just think it could be a nice thing to create for educational reasons, I'm aware of lemmys existence.
- mikpanko 3y agoLots of comments about how to improve the project and the “secret sauce” of Hacker News. The real secret to Hacker News is the ability to attract a large target audience on an ongoing basis to view and contribute. It is the most difficult part of most software projects and especially social ones. Every HN-like project needs to have a plan around this. Andrew Chen explains it well in his book “The Cold Start Problem”.
- andai 3y agoAlso strict rules/culture and paid fulltime moderators/curators.
- junon 3y agoThis. Dang (Daniel) is a cyborg, meant in the best possible way. He moderates this place better than anywhere else on the internet that I know of.
- yooSee 3y agoThat’s a low bar though. I have scraped the comments here at random. There’s plenty of “violations” that are missed. This comment feels like confirmation bias relative to my measure. That people believe it’s a certain type of forum likely plays as much or more of a role than moderation. It intentionally does not function like Reddit or Twitter and that makes obvious what content is favored.
- hyperhopper 3y agoThe two together are key. There are many subreddits which had a great culture but mods went underwater when the sub hit ~100k, the point where every sub becomes closer to the norm. And obviously you can't just pay a mod to create something special, it takes two.
- mnky9800n 3y agoSeems like what people do in Reddit where they want to make a separate subreddit and it ends up being a waste. Why not post these links here? I would read them.
- cachvico 3y agoThe addition of tags to HN would allow the dynamic creation of such sub-sites. Like StackOverflow tags & filtering.
- AstroJetson 3y agoThis is awesome, thanks for taking the time to pull the initial set of articles together. OTOH, there goes my plan for Sunday morning.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y agoAnd you’re posting it here so that C64 enthusiasts can have inane discussions about JavaScript frameworks?
- Waterluvian 3y agoOn the topic of retro computing and gaming: I really want to make retro computer games, but without the retro computer environment. Things like PICO-8 are great but lean heavily on making the whole experience retro.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- UncleSlacky 3y agoI think https://www.vogons.org https://www.vogons.org has the PC/DOS/Windows 9x parts already covered, it might be best to concentrate on non-x86 retrocomputing & gaming instead.
- drcode 3y agoI think you have to keep the mission of your site easy to understand "retrocomputing news" is easy to understand "retrocomputing news except PC, DPS, Windows 9x" is not easy to understand
- mtillman 3y agoI visited the site, clicked the first article I found interesting, and it sent me to YouTube. HN never seems to send me to YouTube which is a plus.
- brudgers 3y agoA large proportion of retro computing content is created for YouTube. To the point I would say anyone currently engaged with retro computing content is probably less adverse to YouTube. Physical engagement with actual retro computers is a different case. HN predates the current status of YouTube and has attracted an audience of readers and writers, I think.
- atan2 3y agoThat's great. Retro stuff is mostly why I check HN daily anyway. I'm glad you took the time to create this.
- helpfulContrib 3y ago[dead]
- hyperfuturism 3y agoDo Hacker News for X ever work? It's too hard to bootstrap a community, hence most fail.
- brudgers 3y agoThe Hacker News for X is Hacker News.
- uwagar 3y agothank you for bringing this to my attention!
- raytopia 3y agoAwesome website! Honestly I do believe there is audience large enough to sustain a hn for retro computing and gaming. Truth be told a lot of those types of posts get drowned out here by business and programming posts.
- falsaberN1 3y agoOh god please let this gain steam it's exactly what I wanted for years.
- jgrahamc 3y agoMake an account! Post things! Comment! Be part of the retro revolution!
- falsaberN1 3y agoAlready did!
- jgrahamc 3y agoThank you.
- LVB 3y agoFirst, I love the idea, and thank you for building this. I have some accessibility feedback on your blog, though, which I'm just now reading. The visited link color is nearly indistinguishable from the body text. I returned to some pages to revisit links and couldn't find them without close inspection.
- shihab 3y agoThe feature I want most from hackernews: I want to make sure I don't miss any frontpage post in a topic of my interest. It could be a browser extension that shows a little star beside the title, or maybe a program on my machine that emails me a bunch of those links at the end of everyday. Either way, no ML or trying to predict what I want - I'm just going to give it some keywords. Now matching a keyword to a post can benefit from some nlp, and that'd be fine. Something simple like tf-idf should probably be enough. As long as the recall is close 100%, low precision is okay.
- phist_mcgee 3y agoLeveraging https://hackyournews.com https://hackyournews.com for the dehyped titles and article summaries would help even more, and probably allow the keywords to surface more consistently.