Show HN: HackerZen – a minimalist Hacker News clone (opens in new tab)

Every so often I open a very long thread on HN and because there are so many replies it slows down my browser considerably. It's mostly the amount of elements in the HTML, so I felt like taking a shot at creating an HN frontend.

I made this minimalist version of HN, and it works by just opening the index.html locally. It creates a local cache of the items fetched in IndexedDB, and only loads a few items in batches.

Replying and upvoting only work with a local server, and also copying the user cookie, since I don't think there is a way to log in via API. This workaround works well if you don't mind installing Node and just running two or three commands, and having the terminal in the background. Any tips to get login working via API if it's possible are appreciated.

Summary:

- plain JS/CSS/HTML

- uses IndexedDB to cache items

- works statically for read-only. Writes require running the local node server locally (instructions in the repo: https://github.com/proc0/HackerZen)

- this is mostly a beta with more features planned