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Show HN: Hacker News frontpage as a print newspaper that you can personalize
- frabjoused 2y agoVery cool, seems like it updates on a delay though, which will probably kill usability. This post is not even on it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 4gotunameagain 2y agoOn brand with newspapers.
- nimbusega 2y agoIt updates every hour. This post is on it now!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cryptozeus 2y agoGood attempt but from the title I thought it would look like an actual print news paper
- mahin 2y agoIt's a bit harder to make it look like an actual newspaper without manually editing the content.
- istillwritecode 2y agoFor those who prefer scrolling to reading I guess.
- nightpool 2y agoVery cool! Looks like it has an XSS vector though :P https://i.imgur.com/5bbKiFc.png https://i.imgur.com/5bbKiFc.png
- nightpool 2y agoThe print stylesheets are also kind of broken. With my printer's default margins, the page becomes an overlapping mess: https://i.imgur.com/lTlFz4l.png https://i.imgur.com/lTlFz4l.png And even with margins turned off, stories are split "across" pages in a way that makes them useless for printing: https://i.imgur.com/SvmTGa8.png https://i.imgur.com/SvmTGa8.png Need to pay more attention to your "break-inside" properties: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/break-inside https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/break-insid... (and switch from using JS-generated absolute styles to using a CSS column layout or masonry grid)
- nimbusega 2y agoThank you! I missed that in my sleepiness. Should be fixed now.
- fdphoughton 2y agoThis is pretty cool, it’s nice to have a clean interface that puts more focus on individual posts (as articles here) rather than tons of headlines where I feel I skim over posts a lot more (particularly the post about Jupiter only caught my attention on your site, not the front page). I’d like if there was some support for customising it without liking and disliking so I could push topics I’m interested in first (e.g. those tagged with emacs). It would also be nice to hide the like and dislike buttons in general as it gives more of a social media feel that the newspaper style UI does well to shake.
- berbec 2y agoThis is nice, but I prefer the simpler style of hckrnews.com
- vunderba 2y agoThere was an iOS app from practically a decade ago that did something very similar, but you could customize with RSS feeds, and it would turn it into a traditional looking newspaper. Sadly, I can't remember the name of it but it was pretty great.
- headclone 2y agoI remember this app as well; “Flipreader” comes to mind but yields no Google results. It was the peak of RSS for me, beautiful UX, customizable, all the posts in sequential order if I wanted instead of algorithms… I remember it because useless when web publishers realized they were losing ad views to apps like these and all the posts became previews with links.
- soylentcola 2y agoI believe you are thinking of Flipboard (still around, but a bit different nowadays).
- franzkappa 2y agoI think you are referring to Flipboard, it is still in the AppStore
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- brianfitz 2y agoFlipboard. https://about.flipboard.com/ https://about.flipboard.com/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- otras 2y agoA fun evolution would be to format it into a newspaper format, complete with headlines, front page, and "continue reading on page N", then print it out on large paper, fold it, and mail it to you. There's probably no money in it, but a physical weekly customized RSS feed highlights newspaper would be neat.
- jgrahamc 2y agoThis doesn't look like a print newspaper. Print newspapers are much denser (in general) and have different headline sizes to emphasize the editor's choice of stories. This looks like a corporate blog home page or something. Some people will like this presentation; I'm pretty happy with HN as it is. But congratulations on shipping!
- SoftTalker 2y agoFor the rest of the news in a more HN-like format (at least at the top level) you might like https://lite.cnn.com/ https://lite.cnn.com/
- Bluecobra 2y agoAlso this site works great in text browsers like Lynx.
- jzombie 2y agoLynx wrapped in Docker: https://github.com/jzombie/docker-lynx https://github.com/jzombie/docker-lynx
- genewitch 2y agoI said "heh" out loud over this. "let's bootstrap a whole OS to run a light weight html renderer" is just something we should all take a moment to marvel at.
- szszrk 2y agoTo be clear: - "Whole OS" is a standard alpine image (4MB) with just lynx installed via standard alpine package. Plus a layer for Lynx itself and entrypoint.sh script. So a very standardized way to run it, with reusable popular base image, decent backbone for delivering it to the public, with ability to easily mirror and/or cache (done by default) each layer. Currently base Alpine has 0 known vulnerabilities, which may not be 0 tomorrow, but it's still a marvel that it ever has such low number. New versions are available instantly after developer creates new public image, without the need for maintainer of a distribution to look at it. Meanwhile your main OS can live it's own life in his own pace, without interference. It doesn't sound scary at all, if you really have a closer look.
- mahin 2y agoNice! I recently worked on a chrome extension that personalizes the frontpage based on embeddings. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-explorer/amiaaonefodebppoklclafmglnkleobk https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-explorer/amiaaon...
- pflenker 2y agoThis is very nice! If you - make it a pwa/web clip - link to the discussions - make the images colored again I’d use it over the regular hacker news ui any day. I know your use case is printing it out, but it’s fantastic for usage on a tablet.
- mahin 2y agoI've added an option to change images to color or remove them. You can view the comments by clicking 'SEE COMMENTS' at the end of the blurb. I'll look into making it into a PWA.
- creative72 2y agoThe images in the website are in grayscale.
- nimbusega 2y agoI thought it would fit the grayscale of newspapers. I can add an option to show them in color.
- billpg 2y agoAnyone remember "Hacker Monthly"? Years ago it was a monthly PDF with nicely laid out copies of popular articles that had been highly voted on here.
- kqr 2y agoThey also printed physical magazines and shipped them out. It was the first time I received a professionally printed copy of something I had authored.
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoLove this project! I would love to collab, please consider open-sourcing this project, or let me know if I can contribute in some way
- twochillin 2y agoYeah would love to play with a couple PRs on this
- mahin 2y agoI'll try to untangle the codebase!
- hakube 2y agoLooks like the NYT
- ilaksh 2y agoAmazing..and you're telling me you made this with less than 600 programmers?
- nimbusega 2y agoI made this to experiment with embeddings and explore how different ways of displaying information affect your perception. It gets the top 100 stories, sends their html to GPT-4 to extract the main content (this was not producing good enough results with html parsing) and then gets an embedding using the title and content. Likes/dislikes are stored in local storage and compared against all stories using cosine similarity to find the most relevant stories. It costs about $10/day to run. I was thinking of offering additional value for a small subscription. Maybe more pages of the newspaper, full story content/comments, a weekly digest or ePub export or something?
- ketzo 2y agoI think some of the highest value from HN comes from the comments, and it's much harder to find the "best" ones, since they might be in threads you might not have otherwise read. Not sure if it's a "premium feature" so to speak, but would be very cool to extend this to comments generally.
- nimbusega 2y agoDefinitely, comments are usually better than the article. I thought of a 'Letters to the Editors' section that shows top comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments) and references the parent story, but it might not be as useful without the context. Maybe 'See Comments' here could load the comments on the same page? In a newspaper like style.
- genewitch 2y agoAI should be able to do "good enough" sentiment analysis combined with the "votes" should be able to quickly find agree/disagree and the quality of the comment - which should not be based merely on the number of complex words, or the length. i certainly suspect that the 4chan and reddit datasets, combined with HN's, and building a LoRA that ranks the 4chan and reddit stuff lower and the good HN stuff higher. essentially, subtract all reddit and 4chan style comments from the set of HN comments' weights. Training SD loras was pretty quick but i haven't looked into LLM loras. regardless, the LLM with the HN-4chan&reddit can do sentiment analysis and use the votes; just feed it csv or json: votes, user, comment. I guess you could do votes/age as a cleanup, too. All this to say i still wouldn't read or use it. I'm not a fan of robots entertaining me.
- banga 2y agoSadly the media="print" view does not provide usable output.
- All4All 2y agoAll I get is "Failed to load stories," am I doing something wrong? Is there something I need to configure before things will load?
- SamCoding 2y agoI just had the same problem and solved it. You have to switch off your adblocker.
- All4All 2y agoInteresting, yup, looks like it was blocked by the network PiHole.
- dredmorbius 2y agoI'd seen that when first loading the site shortly after the story was posted. Some 12 hours later or so, content is loading as expected. No network adjustments made on my end; I suspect the site operator changed their configuration(s).
- karaterobot 2y agoI guess you mean a digital newspaper with a layout inspired by print newspapers. It's definitely not a print newspaper, I know because I tried folding it in half to read on the train, and all that happened was my laptop screen broke.
- SamCoding 2y agoI'm getting the an error of "Failed to fetch stories" The console error is: (index):464 Error loading stories: TypeError: Failed to construct 'URL': Invalid URL at (index):482:36 at Array.forEach (<anonymous>) at NewspaperApp.displayStories ((index):471:25) at NewspaperApp.loadStories ((index):461:26) at async NewspaperApp.initialize ((index):418:17) Can anyone help? I really want to use this product it seems great.
- ideasphere 2y agoIt’s funny how frequently people try to reinvent the wheel re: how this site is laid out. It’s the best part about it!
- pncnmnp 2y agoLooks super neat! I've had a longtime dream of working on a similar project, but I want to make it "Daily Prophet" styled, inspired by the Harry Potter series - https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Daily_Prophet?file=DailyProphet-29November1926.jpg https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Daily_Prophet?file=Daily.... With gifs and effects :) A few years ago, a similar project was posted on HN that I thought was really cool too - E Ink smart screen puts a newspaper on your wall (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323).
- mahin 2y agoThat would be really cool!
- paddy_m 2y agoI would pay money, $1+ postage to maybe $5 + postage to physically print out tweet streams and other articles and mail them to some old people I know. I'm thinking specifically of DieWorkwear on twitter, but others too.
- genewitch 2y agoi just had a silly idea. around 100 years ago there used to be these devices you'd put a scroll in and it would scroll it[0]. the use i saw for it was maps, in cars. you'd insert like interstate 10 scroll #N for whatever section you were on, and as you passed mile markers or exits you'd scroll it. i hope this explains it. So the idea is to replicate that and use receipt paper, and thermal or what, dot matrix print onto the roll of paper your tweet stream. then you get something like those plastic M&M bottles, pill bottle, 35mm film bottle (boy i am full of ancient tech ideas)... if you make some 3d printed cheap compliant mechanism[1] that snaps together and everything fits in a small tin or box... [0] https://gajitz.com/paper-trails-auto-scrolling-1930s-in-car-analog-gps/ https://gajitz.com/paper-trails-auto-scrolling-1930s-in-car-... et https://i.imgur.com/WpyOGkI.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/WpyOGkI.jpeg (two separate links) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compliant_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compliant_mechanism
- eigenhombre 2y agoI liked this for two seconds; then all the pictures loaded in the browser window, and its usefulness to me plummeted. Similar to other commenters, I actually prefer text-only in this context; in particular, the first picture displayed just now was animated, and incredibly distracting. I would probably use this or at least play with it extensively if not for this "feature." I find that, unlike "real" newspapers, leading images in blog posts and even much larger sites are frequently a net negative (a trend greatly worsened with the advent of AI image generators).
- nimbusega 2y agoThat's fair. How about a toggle to not show images?
- genewitch 2y agoI think this is more an indictment of how poorly some publications pick images than any sort of layout issue (or design decision). So probably a toggle throws the baby out with the bathwater. Saw a little cockroach and there was an article about a cockroach - okay, fair. Picture of what looks like a forest fire on an article about tuples - probably net negative.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThe fact that some of the images are animated (presently: the "passport photos" associated with this story: <https://maxsiedentopf.com/passport-photos/ https://maxsiedentopf.com/passport-photos/>) is an absolute turn-off. I'm often reading via an e-ink tablet. Whilst I can drop text quality to better support animations, the effect is a gross degredation of everything else, and of course, why the fuck would I want to see animations randomly? "Animate on hover" is a setting I've long advocated for sites, and coded into CSS both for my own sites and as restylings of third-party sites. It's a compromise between constant distraction and being able to benefit from the very rarely actually useful animation. In the case of the passport photos story, the same effect could be achieved by a grid (2x2, 3x3) showing the variety of photos simultaneously. Detail isn't relevant, variety apparently is, and animation is a cheap eyeball-grabbing trick.
- KerryJones 2y agoIs there a reason you chose not to display the comment count?
- mahin 2y agoI thought upvotes and time ago as more important, and wanted to minimize the meta information.
- belmead 2y agoThis is excellent! I've been using it all day. I do wish it was a bit denser (similar to Drudge Report), but the product is neat enough as is. Congrats!
- mahin 2y agoThanks! I'll experiment with a denser layout. I do think there's too much whitespace, but people usually prefer that.
- ionwake 2y agoThis is super cool
- 3abiton 2y agoLooks really great, did you document the process or background of the project somewhere? I would love to read the journey!
- bobhak 2y agoPretty cool. Like how the animated GIFs will play and the type and whitespace balance is pretty solid. Ever seen Paper-HN? A similar idea: https://www.wolfgangfaust.com/project/paper-hn/ https://www.wolfgangfaust.com/project/paper-hn/ - A fun detail that one has is when you mouseover their photos they go to colour.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mahin 2y agoYes! Came across it while developing this. I loved it. There's also this one for reddit: https://unim.press/ https://unim.press/
- vraylle 2y agoA nice layout. For fun I attempted to actually print (to PDF) and boy was that messed up badly! Guessing that's not the type of "print" you had in mind. :)
- genewitch 2y agogo into the print settings for pdf and set the margins to "none" - that fixed it here. but my workflow was singlefile extension to save as a single html file, then i opened that in another browser and used that to print to pdf - just to make sure i wasn't doing a "but it worked at my house" sort of claim!
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoIt looks like a funeral service webpage with those colors.
- lmpdev 2y agoAs the son of two journalists (one was an editor) news-editing and layout is a lot more than just using serif and playing with typography a bit The closest thing I’ve found to something actually resembling a proper masthead’s layout would actually be this from HN a few months ago: https://cybernetic.dev/grid https://cybernetic.dev/grid Balancing high information density and readability is the key to a proper layout. You’ve erred to far on minimalist “readability” I’d suggest looking at older Indesign/Quark Express magazines if you want to see elements of publishing layouts done digitally There’s going to be a great layout one day that fuses the news-editing with web, but this isn’t it
- bobberkarl 2y agoThank you for this!
- space_oddity 2y agoThis is such a cool idea! It’s like combining the tech-focused content of Hacker News with the classic feel
- vincnetas 2y agoIf it's a "print" do not add changing images. Now we have on first slot "Passport Photos" story with plinking photos, which makes me wanna click X ASAP...
- pmx 2y agoThis is likely down to a simple oversight when loading images from articles. OP probably didn't consider GIF images. I don't think its a choice that was made to add animated images. @OP - you can use Cloudinary to transform images on the fly (also stops you using other sites resources) to fix this issue easily.
- mahin 2y agoYes, I did not think of that. Thank you, I was thinking of how to fix it.
- lintfordpickle 2y agoA really cool project and I like the layout a lot. There a a few things that would be nice to be able to customize, like heading sizes and font, but on the whole this is great work.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThis is pretty cool, thanks for sharing! It's reminiscent in some ways of Slashdot of yore, which would include a slug describing the submission. One of my more persistent issues with HN is that the 80-character-limit title gives parlous thin information on whether or not a submission is worth reading. Additional microcontent, even just another 120-240 characters (10--20 words or so) often helps greatly, and your project demonstrates this. Auto-selecting slugs is of course itself somewhat fraught, one example on the front page of YourHackerNews as I write has a slug beginning "This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution...", which is probably not what you'd prefer: <https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/the-english-paradox-four-decades-of-life-and-language-in-japan https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/the-english-paradox-four-d...>. I'm not a fan of animations as noted in another comment. The "Passport Photos" story has a hero image which animates: <https://maxsiedentopf.com/passport-photos/ https://maxsiedentopf.com/passport-photos/>. One option would be to permit removing an item entirely from the layout. Hitting "X" on a story does not presently do this. HN itself has "hide" feature accomplishing this. In general, I would strongly caution against auto-including images from sites, particularly as those can be pathways to future abuse, including the appropriation of the image-hosting site by unsavoury content. I'd run across an example from an earlier HN submission a few months ago, of the ever-more-aptly named "ShadyURL": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002786>. On layout: Traditional print newspapers aren't merely an assortment of articles, or a ranked placement of articles, but an edited presentation of them. There's usually a top story, of course, but gathered around those will be stories related to the primary feature. See a recent archive of the (online) NY Times homepage for an example: <https://archive.is/HO7xW https://archive.is/HO7xW>. Layouts are also grouped by topical sections. Again the Times demonstrates this (top news, analysis, opinion, "the great read", "the athletic", "culture and lifestyle", etc. The Guardian similarly, with several news blocks for top news, "headlines", "in focus", "spotlight", "opinion", "sports", "climate crisis", etc. HN's news breakdown differs, though looking at the submitted sites, title, and in your case the slug should give some options for largely-automated story placement. I've done my own analysis of HN front-pages, and came up with a list of 47 categories of sites with > 17 front-page appearances (and a great many more without), totaling 16,185 classified sites. Categories: programming (7719), blog (5506), media (816), science (635), news (344), comm. (227), government (129), software (127), video (78), discussion (73), interest (72), design (60), database (57), cryptocurrency (49), law (41), cybersecurity (25), technology (25), commentary (24), recreation (23), hardware (22), medicine (15), documents (14), military (10), literature (9), economics (8), publications (8), list (7), crowdfunding (6), education (6), webcomic (6), (wiki) (5), books (5), info (5), entertainment (4), environment (4), journalism (4), organisations (3), support (3), information (2), translation (2), humour (1), images (1), n/a (1), networking (1), podcast (1), society (1), ui/ux (1). (I can provide the classification file on request, username at protomail.com.) That provides pretty comprehensive coverage of the actual stories submitted (I'd had the exact factor once, I believe it's in excess of 90%). Again: parsing of the titles and/or slugs (perhaps with an AI assist?) could give better classification. Sites such as Lobsters (<https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs>) include tags and often have similar submission selections to HN, which might also be used to organise placement. Another characteristic of traditional layouts is that the horizontal line is reset periodically. If you look at the NYTimes, Guardian, or other traditional news sites you'll find frequent use of horizontal breaks. I don't know if this is a peculiarity of mine or not, but I find that card-style summaries which are not randomly aligned vertically on a page are much easier to read.
- machiaweliczny 2y agoNice. What algorithm is used for recommendation?
- mahin 2y agoIt gets embeddings from open AI and compares them using cosine similarity. Stories are weighted by similarity, dissimilarity and HN score.
- machiaweliczny 2y agoHow you compare a liked set to single embedding? By best match? Or is there some fancier way?
- mahin 2y agoBy averaging the embeddings.
- Rikard_wikstrom 2y agoWould be great to have the option to subscribe to a daily brief and read personalised recommended content in this format. Congrats on shipping
- mahin 2y agoI'm thinking of adding that. How would it be different from visiting the page and reading your personalized frontpage?
- DeathArrow 2y agoBut that just redirects. It would be nicer to also fetch the text and media when you click on a title.
- Fluorescence 2y agoNice! My feedback is that a "front page photo" is a very high bar and most of the images fall well below what deserves the space. I would avoid: - boilerplate page previews for e.g. github - generic site logos e.g. arxiv, aide - stock images and ai equivalents e.g. the models in suits stuff - "decorative" images e.g. prime number - author photos - hate autoplaying gifs in this context. Very distracting. They might be great content better "play on demand" for me Images work better when it's a relevant and a unique visual e.g. the gladiators for the history article or the cockroach but they are still are not really front-page material. To truly earn their place, an image has to add information above and beyond the text. Identifying when an article is actually about an image e.g. space photo, data visualisation etc. would add some real value to the presentation.
- sebastiansm 2y agoAgree. I think I'll stay in the OG site.
- jawilson2 2y ago"Obscure person has died (with no explanation of why I should care)"
- frandroid 2y agoBlame HN users for upvoting the story, not this chrome page...
- floor_ 2y agoI would like to filter all of the HN pet language noise posts. Rust, Go, etc..
- debarshri 2y agonice! I had building something similar a while back based on semafor [1] [1] https://hackernews-semafor-duhw.vercel.app/ https://hackernews-semafor-duhw.vercel.app/
- azinman2 2y agoThere’s a lot of negative commentary here, but this is the first HN alternative I’ve bookmarked. Yes lots could be improved, but I think the concept is nice! Thanks for making this!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rwb_1912 2y agoThis is really cool! I'd love to help out if I can! Shoot me an email — daniel@shaped.ai
- catalypso 2y agoThis looks cool! I now almost exclusively get my HN feed through a simple script I wrote to get desc sorted posts by score or trend (score/time): https://github.com/faroukfaiz10/hackernews-homepage https://github.com/faroukfaiz10/hackernews-homepage The result looks something like this ({score/time} - {score} - {link} - {comments link}): 59 - 1478 - Passport Photos - https://maxsiedentopf.com/passport-photos/ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42069646 16 - 790 - Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities - https://weiyen.net/articles/useful-macos-cmd-line-utilities- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057431 ...
- ElijahLynn 2y agoLove it!!!
- djaygour 2y agoHey HN, I'm building a payment solution that lets customers buy directly from social media without leaving platforms like Instagram, Facebook, etc. So why do we all need this? There are millions of small and medium businesses and brands that can't establish an online presence, and most of them regularly use social media to post about their products. I want to help these businesses. Instagram and Facebook have shopping features, but only for a few brands, and they are not available in many regions like India. India has the world's second most active social media users and millions of businesses trying to acquire customers using social media. I want users and buyers to be able to shop directly from posts without leaving the app. I want my payment model on these platforms to create more convenience for customers and reduce business costs. So, if someone who has worked at Facebook, Instagram, or any other company has valuable advice for me, please share. How can I make this happen? Will these platforms allow me to? Thank you
- p_bits 2y agoThis is the first time in a while I've experienced someone else making a design I have been thinking off, have it even somewhere in my ideas list, newspaper but a more "brutalism" design. I love this, great job!
- AriyanWasi 2y agoI love it. Better UI in general. The only thing is how would I comment on a post? If it had that feature I would even maybe use this exclusively. You could maybe just redirect to the comment page?
- mahin 2y agoThe 'COMMENTS' text takes you to the post.