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Show HN: hcker.news – an ergonomic, timeline-based Hacker News front page
Hi folks,
I've built an alternative Hacker News front page. It is inspired by and meant to be a replacement for hckrnews.com.
I built this because HN is woefully underfeatured, but most sites that try to improve it seem to assume that the visual design is the problem. hcker.news tries to maintain HN's familiarity while adding useful enhancements.
There are three primary views:
- Timeline View: Browse top stories by votes or comments grouped by day, week, or month (e.g., top 20 per day, top 100 per week).
- Aggregate View: See top stories by votes or comments over custom time ranges.
- Front Page View: The original HN front page, untouched.
Feed Filtering:
- Kagi Small Web: View only stories from websites that are a part of Kagi's Small Web, which is a curated list of non-commercial blogs
- Custom Keyword Filters: Include/exclude keywords (e.g., include "Rust," exclude "DOGE") or set a minimum score threshold.
- No HN Algorithm: Timeline and Aggregate Views show stories usually downranked by the HN algo (e.g., flagged posts or those with too many comments).
UI:
- Unread Flags: Quickly spot new stories or ones you haven't seen.
- Two Layouts: Classic HN style or a compact story view inspired by hckrnews.com.
- Multi-column & High-density Modes: Fit more content on screen.
- Themes: Light, Dark, and Manila.
I'd love your feedback and suggestions. Cheers!
- thewinnie 1y agoHey, I just saw this post from hckrnews . com and want to say that I use it everyday! Thank you its a great website!
- postalcoder 1y agoThanks! Yeah, I really like hckrnews.com and used it every day. I built this at first because I wanted a dark mode version and then I got a little carried away, lol.
- ganisgan 1y agoSo cool! Thanks for this!
- postalcoder 1y agoThank you!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jasonthorsness 1y agoOne of the strengths of hacker news is how the core site hasn't really changed (no broken links on any story back to ~2007 as far as I can tell). This steadiness is a rare and valuable feature. The fact that they do this yet also expose the data and access to enable a proliferation of cool alternatives views like this one is extremely user-friendly. Unfortunately, the rest of the internet seems to be going in a different direction and locking things down.
- bobbiechen 1y agohckrnews.com gets about 40% the traffic of news.ycombinator.com, in terms of referrers to my blog (digitalseams.com) - way more than I would have expected. I can't even imagine another site with that much usage of alternative clients; maybe Reddit before their controversial API changes?
- NetOpWibby 1y agoNext might be Digg. They've hired the developer of Apollo.
- phatskat 1y agoWait Digg is back and they have the Apollo dev? I left Reddit over the api mess, Apollo was the only way I liked using their service. Def gonna look into that
- Breza 1y agoGlad I'm not the only one who stayed away from Reddit after the initial boycott. I used to be a regular contributor with a bunch of front page posts. Being away made me m realize how much time, effort, and stress I put into building magic internet points. Now I spend that time doing things for myself instead.
- phatskat 1y agoYep, before Apollo I’d occasionally end up on Reddit randomly, and with that app I found myself getting pretty involved in some wonderful communities. But the whole thing was the final nail for me, and now I’m here but not nearly as engrossed which is nice
- pglevy 1y agoMobile responsiveness?
- postalcoder 1y agoAre you having issues viewing this on mobile? Which browser/device? edit: I broke something yesterday and just fixed it. Thanks for the heads up. I tried to put some thought into making it useable on mobile, hope you try it again.
- gnatolf 1y agoNot a hint of adaptation to mobile (chrome/android).
- postalcoder 1y agoI pushed an update. Please give it another go, sorry about that!
- pglevy 1y agoMuch better, thanks! I'd still like to see a more mobile-friendly comments link though. I sometimes scan those first to see if the article is worth reading.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- coolwulf 1y agoI built a native rust based hacker news client (open source on github): http://fastHNreader.com http://fastHNreader.com And I saw this post from it :)
- collinvandyck76 1y agoI'm going to check this out when I get a chance -- it would be rad if your webpage had an animated gif or video showing it working, too.
- freediver 1y agoLove the inclusion of Small Web filter!
- postalcoder 1y agoI forgot to write it about it in the post. Appreciate Kagi's Small Web project, I love the filter too!
- _august 1y agoThis is awesome! As someone who's trying to be less chronically online, but still wants to keep on top of what's new I love this.
- dbacar 1y agoi find your design easier on my eyes and the content much more accessible. Congratulations.
- postalcoder 1y agoI'm glad to hear it!
- ls-a 1y agoSince no one is able to come close to HN UI/UX for many years, I wonder if HN used a UI/UX designer. If so then shout out to that designer
- rob 1y agoThey nailed it out of the park with the 12px default font size still in 2025. Probably the only site I have to use my browser's zoom feature on.
- ls-a 1y agoTo be fair i have my zoom set to 110% for all websites not just HN
- philistine 1y agoHow many unthinking users just stay away from the web because the text is too small across the board?
- krapp 1y agoMost people browse the web on their phone or watch, I don't think it's a problem.
- consumer451 1y agoIIRC, HN is a fork of early reddit, correct? I am curious how different the features and design were around the time of the fork.
- pests 1y agoI thought Reddit was python and HN is custom written in arc?
- consumer451 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _hcuq 1y agoThis is great. Love the small web filter. Well done! I will be using it.
- postalcoder 1y agoThanks! Feel free to email me if you have any feedback.
- stevenwliao 1y agoThank you for the keyword filter!
- instagib 1y agoYeah, I wrote my own server to pull using the api in Python but the exclusion keyword filter did not work well.
- postalcoder 1y agothank you too!
- looking4job 1y agoI like that it’s inspired by hckrnews.com but it’s not installed like a pwa, it just opens as a new tab when I add it to the iOS home screen. Hckrnews behaves much more like an app without browser chrome. Other than that I like it and will use it instead of hckrnews
- postalcoder 1y agoI just added a manifest, so you should be able to install it as a pwa, but some of the styling is rough around the edges in pwa mode. I'll clean it up.
- atomic128 1y ago"Random recent" browsing is the best way to read Hacker News. It's not addictive, it gives you a quick sample of what people are thinking about recently, prevents your own biases from narrowing your view, etc. For example, https://rnsaffn.com/zg2/ https://rnsaffn.com/zg2/ where each page refresh gives you a random post, plus its parent thread, plus some detail about that post's author's history.
- conroydave 1y agoi like this a lot. any chance you can do the settings in as a url parameter so we can bookmark our preferred configuration?
- postalcoder 1y agoI have a feature branch that's working on just that. I'll get that up soon. In the meantime, configs are stored locally so they’re saved across sessions.
- nico 1y agoVery cool, thank you for sharing One thing that I miss, that I use a lot on HN, is the hide feature. It helps me clear the clutter of stuff that I either already read or am not going to read
- postalcoder 1y agoI can add that, but it'll be local – are you okay with that setting not being synced?
- nico 1y agoTotally fine for it to be local. Thank you for the fast reply :)
- AtroxDev 1y agoReally like your UI! Built something similar for myself (also as an replacement for hckrnews.com): https://hnhub.dev/ https://hnhub.dev/
- postalcoder 1y agoGreat work with this, I like that we both thought to tackle similar things like sorting by date/score/comments within the timeline itself.
- besinpublic 1y ago[dead]
- wvl 1y agoPerhaps an inspired by https://hckrnews.com https://hckrnews.com would be appropriate on the site? btw, to those who want a dark mode for hcrknews, try: https://hckrnews.com/beta/ https://hckrnews.com/beta/
- postalcoder 1y agoThere was already one in the about page but I added some verbiage more prominently up top as well.
- abnercoimbre 1y agoI had no idea -- instant bookmark! Any insights as to why dark mode is in beta though?
- xk_id 1y agoSir if you could finally add keyword filters, I wouldn’t spend half a second considering an alternative. I sorely missed this the past years while HN has been spammed with AI marketing.
- koito17 1y agoNoticed the site flickers when loading. Out of curiosity, I disabled JavaScript and reloaded the site. Unfortunately, the site doesn't work at all without JavaScript, whereas the official Hacker News frontend handles this use-case well. I understand browsing without JavaScript isn't considered a valid use-case nowadays, but it would be nice if the site performed some sort of server-side data fetching. That way users don't experience flickering. As a bonus, while waiting for JavaScript to load, users can at least see headlines (but maybe not stories; that's totally fine).
- postalcoder 1y agoThe flicker was introduced due to a temporary banner I put in that I've since removed. Try it again, thanks for letting me know about it.
- johnisgood 1y agoProbably because of the "Show" / "Hide" thing. He should just use CSS for that. You can mimick it by some CSS hack with checkboxes (that are not really checkboxes as far as the user is concerned). You can have a modal, and multi-step CAPTCHA in CSS, so it should be relatively easy to just stick to CSS for this functionality.
- adrianwaj 1y agoSeeing something like this for /bestcomments would be great too. :) Does one exist already?
- postalcoder 1y agoWow, /bestcomments is one of those pages that I at one point knew existed but totally forgot about since. There's no api for that (I don't think?), but I'm not averse to scraping. I suppose it'd work decently as a fourth view. Would you want to just see it as a list of comments or also in a timeline view as well?
- adrianwaj 1y agoThe top comment right now on /bestcomments was from 7 days ago. It's like some comments only "arrive" onto that series of pages when they get enough votes. I would just have a timeline of all comments that become best. It could be sorted by how new they are to any thread since being submitted to it, or, how new they are to actually becoming classified as a best comment. Former: "freshest best comments" Latter: "newest best comments" To make it really nice, show each comment, and be able to close it from viewing and then remember the state between sessions. That way people can go through each comment and they don't have to read it twice - they've already closed it after having read it. A bit like an RSS reader. Or the person could even delete read or ignored comments. Wait maybe an alternative to all this is to provide 2 rss feeds of previous timelines: new/fresh. !!
- aryan14 1y agoDoesn’t look good on mobile, difficult to use
- postalcoder 1y agocan you share your os/browser?
- insane_dreamer 1y agoGreat design! How about view by #comments (besides time / #points)? What does the colored vertical bar to the left of some posts represent?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- postalcoder 1y agoAppreciate it! You can currently view by resort by number of comments if you switch top Top Comment view but I suppose allowing you to toggle between all is a trivial add. will add that. the colored vertical bar represents unseen stories.
- tonymet 1y agotoo big
- postalcoder 1y agoWhich parts of the UI? And on mobile or in general?
- emmanueloga_ 1y agoI like it! Suggestions: * Clarify relationship with https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ * Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params. That has a lot of usability improvements including being able to share the state, bookmark it, and heads up the current state. Use Rison [1] for the URL params to make it nice to read. * The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence. -- 1: https://github.com/kou64yama/rison2?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/kou64yama/rison2?tab=readme-ov-file
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- postalcoder 1y ago> Clarify relationship with https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ clarified in the about page. > Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params Working on this > The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence. Makes sense i'll give it a shot. Thanks for the suggestions, open to more if you think of any!
- feep 1y agoVery nice. Thanks. Any plans for rss? I currently use https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ (another great project), but the additional filters (once they are available as params) would be nice for rss. As long as I am here, thanks to whoever is responsible for https://hckrnews.com https://hckrnews.com, too.
- adrianwaj 1y agoI made a site called Hackerbrain a while back. #13 here: https://hackerbits.com/hacker-news/improve-hacker-news-ui/ https://hackerbits.com/hacker-news/improve-hacker-news-ui/ One of the best things about it (as mentioned in article) is the ability to see the top comment on any item very quickly. Try it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180804173424/http://hackerbra.in/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180804173424/http://hackerbra.... Press "top" on any item. Also try the number on each. Note how the comments can toggle open/shut and the colors. I would definitely use that feature. :) Also note the byline indents, curved boxes, spacing and popups on each single comment link.
- arvinsim 1y agoI appreciate the option to use dark mode and customize the font size. It's just jarring though to switch the actual Hacker News comment section from the site.
- Brajeshwar 1y agoThere is an "Awesome Hacker News" at https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news Perhaps, you should send a pull request to add this.
- bosky101 1y agoWould have been good if the familiar navbar would have been retained. Btw /show gave 404. Trivial to support those urls. The filters were too tough to find.
- auraham 1y agoGreat design! What did you use for the drawer in the mobile version? I love it!
- dan_voronov 1y agoThank you very much, it looks very cool. Personally, I miss the *hotkeys* because it's not very convenient to constantly click "show" on the automatically collapsing settings block.
- pravosleva 1y agoNeed to have ability to read comments tree. Check out my exp: https://pravosleva.pro/dist.hacker-news-2024/#/news/44075353 https://pravosleva.pro/dist.hacker-news-2024/#/news/44075353
- gloosx 1y ago>>static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/vcd15cbe7772f49c399c6a5babf22c1241717689176015 Why?
- insane_dreamer 1y agoJust tried it on mobile—works very nicely. One thing you could consider would be the ability to upvote a post from the hcker news page (ie you click on a link and read the post and then you come back to hcker page (close other tab) and want to upvote it but don’t necessarily want to go to the commments page. You’d have to be logged in to HN already, I presume. Not sure if this is even possible, just mentioning FWIW
- gaws 1y agoWhy? RSS exists, and it's lightning fast.