Show HN: HN Deck – An alternative way to browse Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HN Deck – An alternative way to browse Hacker News

hndeck.sagunshrestha.com

115 pointssagunsh56 comments

Interesting idea, but I think the comments count; "x comments" should probably be clickable as anyone from HN will instinctively click that, not the "discuss" text.

I did exactly this.

In fact, to perfectly mimic the HN experience, it should be

  plural = "s" if comments > 1 else ""
  "%d comment%s" % (comments, plural) if comments > 0 else "Discuss"

It feels really ugly doing this in Python, but oh well

I also miss seeing the clickable domain next to the submission's title rather than all the way down at the bottom

"Discuss" if comments == 0 else (f"{comments} comment" + "s"*(comments > 1))

Sure, I can put it all in one line too:

  "%d comment%s" % (comments, "s" if comments > 1 else "") if comments > 0 else "Discuss"

Got your point, fixed it. Let me know if it seems correct now.

Perfect!

HN Deck uses Hacker News api to display all tabs in a single page. The interface is inspired from tweetdeck. Code for this app is here https://github.com/sagunsh/hndeck

the mobile experience is beyond lacking tbh.

the "like it? spread the word" header takes about ~25% of my screen and doesnt go away until i specifically put my thumb on that and scroll down. you should at least at a 'dismiss' button to permanently hide that.

after that you're in desperate need of some navigation. put a floating button somewhere which pops up the names of each column, so you're able to quickly jump to it.

the cards itself also are in desperate need of an overhaul for mobile devices. why arent the comments | discuss | url with flex space-between for example. and why is there a line at the bottom of the card?

seems to capture the spirit of tweetdeck on desktop though, so congrats on that front!

Thanks for the feedback. I don't have much experience with CSS prior to this project so tried to make it as simple as possible.

It worked fine in chrome and firefox so I thought it's good enough. I will try to fix it in coming days.

Nice effort! Looks slightly off in my desktop safari browser, but I imagine you're working on css tweaks :)

I'd love to be able to customize the columns. For example, I have no interest in Jobs, and I'd prefer Ask and Show to be mixed together so there are only 3 wide columns.

Also, I've noticed that Ask posts often don't make it to the official Ask page. I've talked to the mods about this and understand there is a threshold, though in my experience it is not accurately applied (sometimes a newer Ask post with more points won't show up, but an older Ask post with fewer points will). I hope you can pull the raw post data instead of just pulling from the 'official' Ask (and probably also Show) pages.

In the spirit of interesting way to browse Hacker News: http://datapeek.org/ ( Hacker News comments backed by data )

FWIW, subscription form doesn't work

I want to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I just assumed that the explanation for atrocious conversion number was bad layout. ( Note to myself: check your website forms every couple of days. )

Side topic, I remember a HN post about a checklist for launching a project. If someone remember it, I would love find retrieve the link.

EDIT: It should work now !

I haven't seen the site yet; I get the following error text:

>Connection to upstream skipped Request ID: 85531377-4387-4f46-8e4e-6db4cd84a094

I'm more concerned about the lack of https. Does your site support SSL? I'll check it out either way, just wasn't present in your original link. For what its worth, I get the same type of error with https.

Yes it works with https [ https://datapeek.org/ ]. There was a some instability when I updated it a couple of minutes ago but it should be fine now.

It works! I'm not sure what I expected, but this is neat. How are the topics generated per post, if you don't mind my asking? Is it automated or curated?

Interesting way to browse, some suggestions

- some visual hierarchy would be good, right now it's quite hard to read at a glance. Some quick CSS overrides, a bit buggy but you get the idea - https://imgur.com/ztmCSNQ - you probably don't also need all the extra info, the headline and number of upvotes/comments most interesting

- I think most of the time you're not interested in jobs or some of the other columns, would be nice to turn them off or add other ones you are interested in (like let's say all recent posts/comments from users XYZ)

-it would be nice to have a preview of the comments without opening the post

Good work OP.

This reminded me of the debate we had in my previous startup when developing a News App[1] in 2015 -

Single article on the screen(me) vs Multiple articles as thumbnails (associate).

My reasoning was that our eyes are going to see one article at a time, we are going to focus on single article at a time, then why crowd the screen with useless items.

My associate's argument was that we should be able see as much information as possible without scrolling.

Well, since I was the CEO; should I say which one did we go for?

[1]http://talkabout.co.in/ [Abandoned long back, updating in personal capacity for android breaking changes ocassionally].

Slightly off topic, but I built a feed aggregator for reddit and HN a few weeks ago: https://readr.page/ (https://github.com/vibhuagrawal14/readr.page) I am going to borrow your interface and add ask/show/jobs/new for HN feed and hot/new/top for reddit!

I have to say yours is a much cleaner interface. Looks great on mobile too. Will be using your interface for some other project.

As an easy fix for the UI, I'd suggest to remove the fixed height for the cards.

Interesting, I've never seen Tweetdeck.

It would be more usable with the share links at the bottom and smaller column headings. Personally I don't often look at the Jobs posts so having a checkbox to hide it would leave more room for other columns' text.

If something could be done to make the 'line 2' info fit on one line would be awesome:

  Ask HN: How to avoid over-engineering
  software design for future us...
  181 points by h43k3r a day ago
  190 comments | discuss

Hover text for both abbreviated titles (and line 2) is useful.

Btw, I also made a 2-col browser that groups by post date. Click the column headings to change view modes. https://hackerer.news

One simple suggestion: make the columns collapsible.

For example, each column can have a "shrink" button that, when clicked, shrinks and allocates it to the side, thereby allowing the other columns to expand into that space.

This way a user can just view the columns they wish to see.

Nice. Quick feedback

1. Trim top part to add more spaces, 2. Link the column headings to /best, /ask, respectively, 3. Remove "Discuss" and link "comments", 4. Fix height (Getting double scroll in small monitors)

Here's mine. It inlines the content from the links on hn into an RSS feed.

https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/...

Looks 'content-type' is wrong; it is displaying inline in Chrome

How are you getting that?

$curl --head https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/...

HTTP/2 200

server: GitHub.com

content-type: application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8

Chrome just doesn't support RSS.

Nice work and I liked the clean layout.

I see you are able to open the URLs directly - something the app I use seems unable to do - perhaps it’s time for me to changes apps.

A feature I’d enjoy is the ability to open both the story and the comments at the same time. I almost always do so manually anyway - i like comparing the (often) hyperbolic article with a does of reality/sense in the comments. Or is it the other way around?

I keep trying to find the time to write something myself - perhaps in Swift or Capacitor. An HN reader seems like a good first project to learn a new language or technology.

This reminds me of a view I have wanted to create but have been too busy to think about. I would like the ability to dismiss stories (swipe away or click [x]). This would allow me to filter out things I'm done with or don't want to engage with. Bonus points for stories coming back if their points increase passed some threshold. This would be limited to the page itself, so it would not be some infinite scroll thing pulling from page 2, 3, etc. It would just have stories from page 1.

There's a "hide" link below stories that enables this.

It would be useful if possible to add that ability to this specific "Deck" application

More visibility to 'new' is good news in my book.

By the time the font size is large enough to approximate the normal site, the design is back to a single column on my monitor, but with worse spacing.

Like it a lot, because:

a) no need for more button; b) optimized for big screens; c) open-source;

Only if HN had downvote button

While it blocks one third of the screen on mobile, what problem is this trying to solve? I feel like I am missing the point of this and miss out on something maybe good.

Well done. I think the bars at the top should not be as tall.

Love it, I'll start using it from now on.

Thank you, feel free to suggest any changes. I have also added the github link.

Personal opinion: Too stories on the screen at once. Is there an option to adjust the number of columns?

awesome project! this is the HN that i've been looking for. the ask/new/show are burried in the original Hacker News but in here, it's balanced and a much better way to view the content. huge props!

another huge props is that you are from nepal, which i rarely see get represented.

Thank you. Yes Nepal rarely gets represented here, are you from Nepal too?

Love it when I could swipe the cards from the deck with headlines I don't care about.

I like it. The only thing I would add is a style for visited links similar to hackernews.

Added styling to visited links. Thanks for the feedback.

Seemed nice until it died. :-) Can't wait to try it some more later.

Ssome nginx issue, fixing it manually. Try now.

This looks interesting... Maybe collapsible model for comments might work?

I like stock HN. The only thing I want to add is some way to skip a long set of subcomments, down to the next top-level one. When a discussion under a single comment spans pages, it's hard to judge tab level and know where to stop scrolling (at least, when I'm on mobile) . Come to think of it, some kind of more distinctive styling on top level ones to make them stand out would also work.

Too busy for me :/

I like this. Will try in the next days and then give feedback.

This is extremely neat! Love it.

Thank you, added the link to github repo if you want to explore more

oh man, that's great. Love it.

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