Show HN: Hackeroo the Better UI for Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hackeroo the Better UI for Hacker News

hackeroo.co

17 pointsl1am021 comments

Constructive feedback here. Don't take this thread personally, I'm sure it was a great learning experience but as a final product is not nearly there.

I don't have data to back up it but I feel that the actual UI and the lack of ads of HN are important factors on its success. Simple, in the long term, usually wins. Ok you like dark mode, make a browser extension that does it.

Examples of relevant alternative front-ends for HN:

https://hckrnews.com/

https://hnews.xyz/

I like the look of it. I prefer dark themes. Having a bunch of different togglable sources is a nice touch.

I'm ad tolerant. I'm pleased that ads are clearly delineated as ads.

It's less dense than HN. On HN /new I can see 15 stories. On Hackeroo I can see 6. The "read later" and "discussion" links don't need to be there, and could be toggled off maybe?

But it's nice!

I agree w/ this sentiment. Might be a thought to have a pro version that maybe lets you bookmark and write 'notes' about things seen on these. I get startup ideas and app ideas from these sources, and it'd be nice to be able to star them in one place, order the stars by priority, have one unified inbox, and stuff like that.... probably a lot more work, but it'd be cool as hell.

I would be interested to know by which qualities Hackeroo is the better UI.

By the very measurable metric of distance between the UI elements - as every self respecting Ux designer knows, the larger the distance, the higher the quality.

Then as one without the slightest insight to the UX world, I can still happily report you can increase the distance quite a lot more!

Low information density, on the landing page I see only 6 rows per viewport whereas hckrnews gives me 15. Do wish hckrnews had a nightmode though

Computer or mobile?

Brave has a dark mode flag on Android.

Hacker news with ads? No, thank you.

Also some of the discussion links don't work.

And I couldn't use the back-button to get back to regular HN.

Frankly, this sucks.

What good is an alternative view if every time I click on a comment I land on the "real" HN? Personally the comments are the reason why I use HN.

What a bold statement! No, thanks, it's not a better UI. You might now say that it's subjective but so is your claim.

White on black is absolutely unreadable

I find it very readable. I'd agree that #fff on #000 would be hard to read, but this is (I think) #f8f8f2 on #272822.

I'm not the original commenter but I agree that it's generally readable, although it's not exactly pleasant on my AMOLED phone where the background is really dark if not black. If I turn the brightness down the white text becomes a little dimmer which helps, though I would prefer a slightly less dark background instead.

EDIT: Yes, the background is #161718, so not quite black.

I think somehow the simplicity is lost. I think the upvote and downvote colors are too bright that makes it annoying.

I'm kinda was confused by the sorting functionality between different sources. I think I would prefer HN itself or Feedly.

There is no support for comments though. Which I believe is the soul of hacker news.

How about mine http://repo.memkits.org/hn-reader/?id=23122813 .

Could not figure out what to top row icons mean. what is going on over there?. Dark mode should not be default give the choice to users

Hard pass.

It's unusable without JavaScript enabled. Complexity is not inherently better. Less is more.

It's better if it gets rid of the obnoxious and offensive "you're posting too fast" bullshit.

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