Hacker News Reader

Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

There's an app? Why??

It's the plainest of websites. I've been using it on android and iPhone for years without ever thinking "oh boy this would be better with an installable update able app asking me permissions and doing who knows what on my device". I assume any apps out there would be 3rd party scrapers...

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Most 3rd apps use the Hackernews API https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Having tried to write an HN client myself, I can assure you most of them scrape instead of using the API. The API is basically read only, is impractical for things like loading a full tree of comments (get ready to make an API call for every comment) and you need to scrape if you want things like “what auth hash do I need in order to upvote this particular comment via POST”.

I use Hermit to appify often accessed pages, you get a Hackernews icon on your Android desktop that behaves exactly like an app, has its own cookie jar that does not leak browsing information etc.

The interface paradigm of mobile devices is built around apps, mobile browsers are a pain in the butt - deliberately, most likely.

I use https://github.com/weiran/Hackers because it’s nice to read on, but then to comment I have to use the site, so yea lol

If there was a dark mode on the site I’d just use that

Octal lets you comment from the app, if that’s something you are missing.

Oh cool, thanks I’ll take a look

I use materialistic on the phone. Design is nicer for mobile, plus I'm addicted to dark mode.

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