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.
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
So even though I really like (and will bookmark!) this new interface design, I hope HN proper never changes.
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.
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.
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.
(Disclosure: I made it)
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.
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 :)
My take on social media is that you have to have an image in a post if you want people to engage with it.
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?
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.
[0] https://ogp.me/
I really like the newspaper like layout.
My own hackernews frontend project is this: https://news.facts.dev/interests
The goal was to add a quick way to filter by interests
Not every story is deserving of a photo, and if their presence felt more curated it might significantly improve my experience on your site.
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?
https://www.macstories.net/ipad/the-early-edition
Sadly it's no longer around.
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.
What are your plans for this project?
(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)
did we hug it to death?
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!
There are a few news sites that have barebones/low-bandwidth or HTML-only frontends. For example:
The extensions I've tried added a bunch of features I don't care about.
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.
