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Show HN: Hacker Herald – like HN but with crowdsourced pics and subtitles
Hi folks this is a project I worked on with some of my students when I was running an online JS programming course. Although the online course is no more, I finally got around to releasing Hacker Herald with a former instructor and student - thanks Arnav and Archis!
To those wondering if there is a need for such a Hacker News front end, I would just point out that most newspaper websites are laid out like this - clearly some people like this kind of layout!
Also for some stories a picture really does help - currently there is a HN story titled, "Portland airport grows with expansive mass timber roof canopy". But IMO it's better to actually see a picture of the timber roof while scrolling rather than having to click through to the article.
- lukasfoisy 2y agoI suspect many folks here enjoy the minimalist Hacker News UI but I, for one, really enjoy what you've put together. It somehow makes me more interested in checking out stories/posts I might have otherwise skipped on the normal UI. I'll give this a spin day-to-day. What are your plans for this project?
- voodooEntity 2y agoAs someone from the "minimalist prefered" guys, im just curious - what articles sparked your interested through this layout and why would you have skipped them on the normal layout? (inb4 i think the herald is a very well done thing i just cant think of a reason why an article there is more interresting than on the normal layout)
- lukasfoisy 2y agoFrom today: "Portland Airport Grows With Expansive Mass Timber Roof Canopy" is a good example. I wouldn't have opened this story on Hacker News, but the image displayed on Hacker Herald had me open it.
- alt227 2y agoThat is an extremely impressive roof, and I agree that the title isnt grabbing. I too clicked on the picture but had previously skipped the article on HN.
- voodooEntity 2y agosorry for my late response. Thanks for giving me this example. I can kinda see why you would not click it in first place. As for me - i have very limited time i spend on reading articles listed on hackernews so i always have to condense it down to those im very interested in.
- MarkMc 2y agoThanks! No fixed plans for future development - it kind of depends on how much traction it gets. If it gets a lot of interest I might add a 'AI editor' that chooses images and write subtitles (or deletes boring ones which have been written by the article's author). But even if it gets little use besides myself, hosting costs are minimal so it will be around for a while :)
- mr_mitm 2y agoMy first reaction was: this is super cool. I can't say whether I'll stick to it as I often read HN via newsboat and https://hnrss.org/frontpage https://hnrss.org/frontpage, but I'll give it a try! Thanks for sharing!
- eigilsagafos 2y agoA love that HN doesn’t have pics and that they strive for short meaningful titles, so I’ll stay here :)
- iLoveOncall 2y agoI agree about the no pics, but come on, HackerNews has extremely cryptic titles more often than not. Half of the frontpage is always made of titles that are either referencing ultra-niche products, clickbaity, misrepresent the content of the article, try to be smart, etc. If anything, HackerNews would be BETTER if it did not have post titles but only excerpts.
- dang 2y agoThere shouldn't be titles that are either clickbaity or misrepresent the article. The site guidelines call for rewriting those ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.") and we're pretty active in doing so.
- iLoveOncall 2y agoBut I think this is not enough. Not misrepresenting is not enough, they should instead represent the content of the article. If I take a random one on the front page right now, "The square roots of all evil", it doesn't describe at all its content. Yet if I flagged it, I know it wouldn't be renamed. Another example is an earlier post that got a lot of traction: "The correct amount of ads is zero". This is borderline misrepresentative to be fair, but even being lenient on that aspect, it is not at all helping me understand what I will be reading if I decide to click on this article. Those articles thrives on HN because even if it's not exactly clickbaity, the titles have a "shock factor" that makes people click on them.
- dang 2y agoYes, I hear you—you want titles to be more than neither-linkbait-nor-misleading, and you're right that we mostly don't go further than that on HN. I also agree that the two titles you quoted are borderline baity and both of them are the sort that we could well do an edit on, though we didn't in those cases.
- uwemaurer 2y agoAlways great to see alternative hackernews frontends! I really like the newspaper like layout. My own hackernews frontend project is this: https://news.facts.dev/interests https://news.facts.dev/interests The goal was to add a quick way to filter by interests
- nlvraghavendra 2y agoNice!
- redm 2y agoThe saying, “If it ain't broke, don’t fix it,” comes to mind. I’m all for progress, but Hacker News's simplicity and density are its major features.
- mouse_ 2y agoIMO it's not fixing something, it's offering an alternative perspective.
- PeterHolzwarth 2y agoVery true of course, but I find that at this point, I use https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ as much as I use vanilla HN now, at this point, as often I want this a bit fresher and raw. Of course, hckrnew also uses the same minimalist front end style of vanilla hackernews, so I'm sure that contributes.
- mertysn 2y ago^ hckrnews.com replaced vanilla HN for me years ago: you never miss popular articles if you don't visit the site for a while, and you can change the filtering to include more results if you have more time to browse. It's been wonderful for my browsing habits.
- lastdong 2y agoDark theme option comes to mind.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoOne tip, it might be an idea to create permalinks, so that people can open up the page at any specific date instead of just the past week. I don't know if that's feasible though, is the data for each page generated statically or kept updated?
- mrbluecoat 2y agoAdding search would be a nice value-add
- jasfi 2y agoThe pics help to disambiguate some of the titles, but its nowhere near as lean as HN.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoI like it. I think you need some kind of ... mascot. Like a town crier with a smart phone up by the banner. Is this one scenario where perhaps you should reverse the order of the "tabs" along the top? Like put "Today" on the far right with "Yesterday", etc. following from right to left? Or honestly ditch them altogether — adding "Yesterday" is more than enough. Who wants to go back several days to read old news?
- croisillon 2y agoi would suggest to add unpaywalled links where relevant
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoI'm not sure of some of the feedback being given here - the magazine layout seems to get me focused on stories that are interesting but that wouldn't have caught my attention otherwise.
- voodooEntity 2y agoWhile i have to admit, from all the alternative frontends i have seen over the years (and there have been alot) this is by far the best. Tho as many others mention, one of the great things on hackernews is the minimalism / simplicity - and i have to admit its one of the reasons why i always like to go on hackersnews. Just a simple textlist, easy to read, no visual clutter. Tho for people that like a more colorfull/stylish layout this might be a good alternative
- cloverich 2y agoFor me, I think the lack of more generalized appeal of the interface is a net benefit, because it limits its appeal to only those that are most interested in the content. When it becomes too nice, and the audience too large, it will probably lose the thing that most of us are here (as opposed to reddit) for. So even though I really like (and will bookmark!) this new interface design, I hope HN proper never changes.
- amelius 2y agoIt is ironic that the people responsible for most of the UX cruft on the internet (i.e., us programmers) prefer such minimalism in their interfaces.
- dbtc 2y agoThe dealer knows best what the drug will do.
- thorncorona 2y agoi think most designers think hn is ugly lol
- written-beyond 2y agoI like the minimal interface, gives an old.reddit.com vibe. HN is horrible to use on mobile though. Everything is tiny, difficult to tap I miss tap every 3 taps
- 2y ago
- swyx 2y ago> Something went wrong Please try again. did we hug it to death?
- Sn0wCoder 2y agoSame issue need to turn off VPN / AdBlock....
- password4321 2y agoThanks for being willing to stick your neck out by putting your own spin on things! I'm always interested to hear more about the sustainability of alternative HN frontends... the initial time investment, ongoing hosting costs, etc. Maybe it'd be worth doing the research to find out what the probability is of lasting longer than the domain renewal year, especially for those such as this offering the chance for users to invest additional value.
- phendrenad2 2y agoIn retrospect, I should have expected the goatse as soon as I clicked to vote on images.
- shahzaibmushtaq 2y agoThumbs up for the effort, I prefer the default HN outlook.
- redeux 2y agoPersonally, I don’t care for the images on the articles. I find them distracting from the information I actually want, the headline and content. It seems that their purpose is purely aesthetic in this UI, but not a pleasing one for me.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Retr0id 2y agoI notice you're hotlinking the images from their respective sources. This isn't ideal from a privacy PoV, because you're basically announcing your presence to tens of different orgs even if you don't click on anything. And, some hosts might not appreciate their images being hotlinked - the big sites probably don't care or even notice, but someone's personal blog without a media CDN might end up getting hammered with traffic.
- rfl890 2y agoIf you're posting content on HN, you should always expect a traffic increase anyways. And Cloudflare CDN is free anyways (unless you don't want to use it for political reasons, your choice)... Although I understand hotlinking is frowned-upon in a general context
- wmeredith 2y agoI had the same thought. Hot linking images has been bad form since like 2004, if not earlier.
- iamjaredkim 2y ago[dead]
- sjf 2y agoThe site is neat, but the airport article is really the only one that benefits from an image though. It'd be nice to not have to scroll past logos, stock images, etc.
- MarkMc 2y agoThe presence or absence of an image depends on user votes. If you feel an image is not useful, click the '...' button and select 'Suggest or Choose an Image' > 'This story does not need an image'
- rkagerer 2y agoIs there a way I can raise the threshold? Not every story is deserving of a photo, and if their presence felt more curated it might significantly improve my experience on your site.
- badcppdev 2y agoI like how this looks but I have a feature suggestion.... Could you crowd-source categories/tags for the stories and then try and implement an opt-in / opt-out function that lets us exclude certain categories. I'm not even sure if it's possible but you're some of the way there.
- MarkMc 2y agoThanks that's a good idea! I think I'd need to use AI to categorise each story, then maybe have different tabs on the page for each category...
- kirubakaran 2y agoYou might like this: https://histre.com/hn/ https://histre.com/hn/ (Disclosure: I made it)
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoCare to share how you do the tagging?
- kirubakaran 2y agoSure. I extracted tags from here https://lobste.rs/tags https://lobste.rs/tags and expanded on that just from having spent a lot of time on HN. Then the app uses GPT3.5 to choose the appropriate tags for each story from the master list of tags. More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988
- jack_riminton 2y agoMaybe have an option to view the main page as a list (ie copies Hacker News) but then each individual page has the photos?
- tunnuz 2y agoI love it, I wonder if LLMs couldn't be used to generate some pictures.
- internetter 2y agoLLMs cannot generate pictures
- Sn0wCoder 2y agoThink you are being downvoted because technically an LLM stands for Large Language Models, while image generation is something like LDM latent diffusion models or most people just say Stable Diffusion. If you would have said the more generic ChatGPT then the answer would have been maybe since its supposed to be Multi-Modal. If you are asking if Stable Diffusion could generate pictures based of the article description the answer is most likely yes given the prompt correctly parses the context correctly (maybe using an LLM for getting the prompt before feeding into the next tool). I hear almost everyone call everything ChatGPT no matter what they are using (MS, Google Gemini, Ollama, etc…) ChatGPT made me a PP, ChatGPT made this image, so maybe if you want a general term ChatGPT would be more correct. I typically say ChatGPT for LLMs and Stable Diffusion when talking to normal people since most are familiar with the big two. Predicting the next pixel to draw is sorta like predicting the next word (token) I guess Most people know what you mean, but still good to use the correct term. Disclaimer so I do not get downvoted with you: Please do your own research as I just wrote how I understand these concepts and am not an expert.
- satvikpendem 2y agoIt's funny because LLMs are now also using diffusion.
- PaulHoule 2y agoOne of the best HN redesigns I've seen in that it's not just "add whitespace" but is a totally different layout. My take on social media is that you have to have an image in a post if you want people to engage with it.
- sourcepluck 2y agoYou're writing that on a medium which is social which gets tons of engagement which doesn't have any images. I don't get it. Surely every single thread that got even modest engagement on HN since the beginning of the place disproves your take?
- PaulHoule 2y agoHN is unusual because it is that way. There's nothing wrong with that. But let's put it this way. If I find a popular article on a ScienceX site I often find it links to a journal article which may or may not be open access, let's assume that it is. Posting to HN I will usually post the open access article. Posting to Mastodon or Bluesky I will usually post the ScienceX link because those platforms can find an image in those articles but can't find an image in a paper in Nature. (Note on those platforms I get replies like "this is over my head" when I post a real paper whereas nobody in HN wants to admit that vulnerability) If somebody makes an HN clone which merges in images, those images are going to have a big impact on people's engagement with that clone.
- InMice 2y agoVery nice. My compliments to you
- justmarc 2y agoI like it, but I also like the simplicity of HN because I can simply scan all the headlines super efficiently, without any distractions and quickly see if something is of interest.
- yoda97 2y agoGood effort, but tbh the absence of pictures is actually what I like about HN, that's why I could never get into daily.dev
- TripleChecker 2y agoI like the re-design. Maybe including the actual date instead of 'Tuesday', 'Monday' in the header might be clearer. Just a thought.
- olegrumiancev 2y agoI think this is beautiful
- rkagerer 2y agoI want to thank you for doing this, but for a different reason: it reminded me how much I appreciate the vanilla HN layout. I viscerally HATE all the news sites that look like your project. I've sought alternative sources of news with a more old-school look, without success. I used to think it wasn't just the pictures. I found the average quality of reporting went down, along with a rise in clickbait headlines and stories, around the same time mainstream outlets adopted the new format. I figured that may have been part of what conditioned me to hate it. But now I realize the cosmetic factor really is quite substantial. I like being able to digest lots of information in front of me at once, and the words on the HN site pack in better density (I guess it turns out not every photo is worth a thousand of them). Yes, the timber roof photo looks great. But too many of your crowdsourced pictures feel almost generated, rather than authentic to their associated piece, and I find them distracting. Thank you YC, for sticking to your guns and keeping the 'boring' layout all these years!
- Andrew6rant 2y ago> "I've sought alternative sources of news with a more old-school look, without success." There are a few news sites that have barebones/low-bandwidth or HTML-only frontends. For example: https://lite.cnn.com/ https://lite.cnn.com/ https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ https://www.cbc.ca/lite/ https://www.cbc.ca/lite/
- alecco 2y agoIt would be interesting to have some highlighter over the titles to make it easier to scan. Could be some very simple AI in a browser extension. Maybe even have some color tags while there. Pretty simple. The extensions I've tried added a bunch of features I don't care about.
- woleium 2y agouse feedly or theoldreader or another rss tool?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Sn0wCoder 2y agoThe UI is very nice. Congratulations on the release, with all the articles about releasing the last few days must feel good. Does not like my VPN / AdBlocker, getting a few CORS errors connecting to the Amazon S3. If you really want people to use the site would recommend proxying the request through the server. If you are already running a node.js server straightforward to do, if not still a huge leap but would also want to configure Caddy (NGINX) [or run on the same server and block the port] to run the proxy locally and forward only your requests so it does not get abused. A lot of the audience here is running AdBlock and / or VPN so others are most likely to hit the same issue.
- vunderba 2y agoNice - reminds me of an old RSS reader for iPad that would build out a newspaper looking aesthetic called "The Early Edition" from nearly a decade ago. https://www.macstories.net/ipad/the-early-edition https://www.macstories.net/ipad/the-early-edition Sadly it's no longer around.
- cjsawyer 2y agoI prefer the density of the original, but your addition of "Today", "Yesterday", "Wednesday"... buttons is excellent. That is much more useful than the infinite scroll on the vanilla homepage.
- kayge 2y agoThis other alternative interface might interest you: https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ Fairly high density, divided by day, and able to reduce down to groups of Top 10 / Top 20 / Top 50%. This is my go-to since Top 10 is about all I have time for these days :)
- h1fra 2y agoWe really need a hacker news dedicated to hacker news redesign
- ivanjermakov 2y agoA great example of how little information preview images add to the news/article websites. This is the reason why HN feels so good to read.
- johnea 2y agoThe best HN "frontend" is the IRC channel on libera!
- prophesi 2y agoI'm not sure how the pics/subtitled are crowdsourced, but I'm wondering if it'd fare just as well simply using the OGP protocol? ie, the preview cards we see in most apps/platforms where links are posted. And if they don't have the OGP[0] tags, it could fallback to the crowdsourced solution. Or even let users choose which should be their default, and the ability to swap between the two? [0] https://ogp.me/ https://ogp.me/
- kimusan 2y agoI would love to get this for the different HN categories like "ask" and "show" (I personally use the "show" part way more than the noisy frontpage)
- satvikpendem 2y agoFor those who want something similar but for YouTube, there's DeArrow, to eschew clickbait thumbnails and titles and replace them with crowdsourced ones.
- rodary 2y agoTo OP: please keep it going.
- bijinpanicker 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]