"Hacker News" for retro computing and gaming | Hacker News Reader

"Hacker News" for retro computing and gaming

blog.jgc.org

422 pointsrcarmo122 comments

Great. It's a good idea to have a HN-like platform with a narrower focus. Another idea would be to add focus areas to HN itself, maybe similar to subreddits. When I currently scan the "new" pages, I find less than 3% of the posts interesting.

Personally I like the fact that some days I find very little of interest. It keeps me focused. Sometimes there can be too much content in our daily lives.

I agree! I’ve often told my friends that the somewhat ‘boring’ nature of HackerNews is a feature, not a bug.

Well, then just don't look at it and focus on other things; that's what I do; but when I then come back later it's practically impossible to keep up and scan the whole stuff just to find the very few interesting posts; it would be much more efficient (with a positive effect on the ability to concentrate on the essential things) to just scan a pre-selected focus area.

I love it the way it is. If I miss out on an interesting story, so be it. But having all the other stories in between helps me looking left or right. I might not be knee deep into genomics, but that one article could just be interesting. I prefer that over tailored content. That’s what I use reddit is for.

You don't need to sub-divide areas of endeavor. You could have all research, vs all practice, and maybe a place to stuff things that will cause political engagement and heated discussion? I dunno, /. did that and the proliferation of flame-bait stories still killed the site for me.

Sometimes I want a 5 minute distraction without my FOMO (fear of missing out) kicking in on an article I might have missed.

Anyways, I’m not saying your request is unreasonable. Just offering a counter perspective.

Honestly I think this is a feature, not a bug. I like that there's a bunch of things I don't find interesting. Sometimes I'll read stuff in not drawn to anyway, mostly just for the (typically) insightful commentary on this site. I've learned countless new things because of it, and things I didn't find immediately interesting turned into a topic of interest.

Case in point: the other day there was a posting about scanning old scrolls for text, and I found the topic dull. Reading the commentary I learn about the Ea-Nasir tabled[1] and found it both amusing and interesting. I also learned there's a whole subreddit dedicated to this topic, and reading through some of the funnies I decided to go back and read the actual article about scanning the scrolls. I then learned much more than I thought I wanted to learn about true intricate process and labor involved in doing this work, and found it quite interesting indeed.

So yeah, I'd much rather a high percentage of posts on this site continue to be about topics I have no immediate interest in, because you never know...

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir

That's a good reason I keep coming back to HN:

* Exposure to related, but outside-my-usual interests.

* Keep informed about what gets ppl in other fields exited, or where tech like AI, bio sciences, renewables etc are heading.

* "Today I Learned:"...

When something seems boring on HN I open it and go straight to the comments.

Also, I have this weird effect, when reading something not on HN, in the end I forget, and look for the button wondering what HN has to say about it. The disappointment each and every time..

That's how I use the HN frontpage.

This is going to sound overly simplistic, but maybe don't scan "new", then? Just look at the front page, where the stuff that interests people has bubbled up. And if nothing there interests you, maybe your interests have simply diverged from what the rest of HN finds interesting. There is nothing wrong with that from either side.

You can read just the day's top posts here. I don't know how the majority of people here tolerates the default UI.

https://hckrnews.com/

"When I currently scan the "new" pages, I find less than 3% of the posts interesting."

I find general News sites unreadable. Just trash, shitloads of advertisements, they try to blur the line between news and advertisement. You can't even navigate this stuff without an adblocker.

Using an RSS reader with selected feeds, helps a lot. Especially since you will have many blogs that rarely post something and without an RSSReader you would not be able to follow them.

Obviously: https://hnrss.org/frontpage

I'm talking about this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest; it's just every post in chronological order. The selective RSS reader only helps if someone (or a good individualized algorithm) has done the selection.

Something like https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=50 will ensure your RSS reader won't get cluttered. You could apply also try say https://hnrss.org/newest?points=50 play around with it a little until the outcome makes you satisfied. The syntax is available at https://hnrss.org

I like how random/catch-all it is. I don’t have to go through a million subs and just check what’s there and always find something interesting and unique. It’s why I hang in resetera.com (etc) even though I can’t stand the community.

Lately it seems there's more submissions completely unrelated to the interests of hacker news denizens.

Does it matter? If I submit a link that doesn't interest HNers, it won't be voted for or commented on and will have basically no effect on anybody here.

Only if you browse the new tab would this matter to you. I do frequently so it matters to me.

It matters to anyone who has to slog through the new submissions queue.

Just like vim motions are the best way to manipulate text. HN news format is the best way to have a news/message board.

Agree. Or allow users to create their focus areas (tabs) by automatically categorizing topics based on the content.

That's a shame you find less than 3% of it interesting.

Have you tried this website called reddit.com? It's just chock full of interesting things and rational discussions. You'll love it there.

I wonder if it would be interesting to make a blog that looks like the HN UI. Then when you click a link it shows the full article first rather than the comment thread. It's a nice minimalistic design imo.

I use an RSS reader and see the title, the link to the article, and the link to the comment thread. This is currently my favourite way to read HN and I think there’s benefit to having both be only one click away

Love the idea! However, it seems that you’re running a non-mobile friendly version of the hacker news design. Making it responsive would be greatly appreciated!

Yeah. I need to work on the mobile version. Just haven't had time. An TBH I know little about responsive design. Where should I start?

It's currently set up on a VPS running news.arc in a screen session connected to the Internet via Cloudflare Tunnel. If it falls over while I'm out today... sorry!

> Where should I start?

Use @media queries to modify the CSS rules. The bare-bones approach is a breakpoint around 1024 width where everything below is 100% width (with a small margin/padding if you like). That way smaller tablets and phones have a decent experience without horizontal scrollbars.

Thank you!

Maybe you can just reuse the css from news.ycombinator.com? I don't know how much the code has drifted compared to the open source version.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css, specifically the @media parts

the rss feed includes some garbage on the link to the comments. it seems it adds `item` before the `/` which renders the url invalid. eg https://twostopbits.comitem/?id=61 but https://twostopbits.com/item?id=61 works fine

The beauty of having the REPL is that I've fixed this. Missing trailing / on the site URL:

    (= site-url* "https://twostopbits.com/")
    "https://twostopbits.com/"
     
    (= parent-url* site-url*)
    "https://twostopbits.com/"

My initial reaction is that this is yet another place in a growing list for retro stuff, and many of the very active retro people are already sharing news and interesting links on Reddit, Xitter, Bluesky and the Fediverse; for example, I see Ken Shirriff is well represented on OP's site, but I am following him and others, and converse directly with them, on the socials anyway.

The saving grace is that, as an aggregator, there's an rss feed so the site contents can come my way rather than needing to go have a looksee, however I am more likely to comment elsewhere where I have an established account rather than create yet another one to use and manage for yet another site to visit.

Idea: what if we had a "federated" network of hacker news like sites based on ActivityPub? I understand that there are already federated reddit clones but I think this may be a cool project to learn more about ActivityPub.

> Idea: what if we had a "federated" network of hacker news like sites based on ActivityPub?

HackerNews is already a news aggregation service, just like Reddit, countless other Reddit clones, lobste.rs, and most fediverse platforms.

Just drop by one of the many Lemmy servers and create a community. There's no need to overcomplicate things. You can even create and manage your own instance if that's your thing.

> Just drop by one of the many Lemmy servers and create a community.

I checked and there's already a retro gaming community in Lemmy.

https://lemmy.world/c/retrogaming

You may have missed the last sentence of my comment. I just think it could be a nice thing to create for educational reasons, I'm aware of lemmys existence.

Oh god please let this gain steam it's exactly what I wanted for years.

Make an account! Post things! Comment! Be part of the retro revolution!

Already did!

Thank you.

First, I love the idea, and thank you for building this.

I have some accessibility feedback on your blog, though, which I'm just now reading. The visited link color is nearly indistinguishable from the body text. I returned to some pages to revisit links and couldn't find them without close inspection.

Seems like what people do in Reddit where they want to make a separate subreddit and it ends up being a waste. Why not post these links here? I would read them.

Well, a lot of stuff gets drowned out due to the incredible size of HN's userbase.

I understand. If you cross post, I will read such articles on hacker news.

Love the concept!

Let's hope it attracts some audience.

Btw: seems to work when you drop the /news at the end (just the site name). Perhaps make that a permanent feature? (unless you plan to have other content on that site of course). Or use a subdomain like HN does.

The addition of tags to HN would allow the dynamic creation of such sub-sites. Like StackOverflow tags & filtering.

Another reason that this resource is amazing: a lot of retro work/reverse-engineering etc. is done in communities for different platforms + architectures. Some cross-pollination would be fantastic.

Would love to hear what enhancements retro folks would like. The one thing I plan to add shortly is tags so that it's possible to filter by say 6502 or c64 or zelda or ...

Fill in title field from URL, it isn't clear from the submit page if this is already a feature or not

Mobile CSS

Email notification on responses is very useful; for HN I have to use http://www.hnreplies.com/ for this.

I'd vote against that. You end up with two people going back and forth which usually isn't great for everybody else. I really like the HN model. It encourages you to say what you are going to say and get out of the thread.

If you do need or want to see the responses, you can do that easily enough by looking at your own comments. A little friction here is a good thing IMHO.

It seems like a lot of the suggestions here would turn it into something more like Reddit. That already exists. No point in recreating it.

Yeah. I am not going to do that. It's a positive feature of HN that you can't get notified.

You can switch if off of course.

Find URLs in text and make them into links

Let me see comments to me like HN's comment page

Be able to register without providing an email address.

Out of interest, why? If you want to use a throwaway those are easy, services like simplelogin.io exist if you don't want to DIY.

My ISP just fucked up their interface and I cannot create aliases anymore. For Two Stop Bits, you can put anything as e-mail, they don't try to confirm it anyway.

also, the possibility to unvote.

Or minitel...

This is awesome, thanks for taking the time to pull the initial set of articles together. OTOH, there goes my plan for Sunday morning.

That's great. Retro stuff is mostly why I check HN daily anyway. I'm glad you took the time to create this.

I built HN for law using Python. At first it was quite slow, but after doing some tweaks, it loads just as fast as HN. Check it out: https://courtroom.sixftone-mlh.repl.co/

1) nice agregator but do you remember on "https://hardwary.com/" also HN clone after short time is death...

2) Why Retro Text only webpage require news.js :-( not for retrobrowsers....

The feature I want most from hackernews: I want to make sure I don't miss any frontpage post in a topic of my interest.

It could be a browser extension that shows a little star beside the title, or maybe a program on my machine that emails me a bunch of those links at the end of everyday. Either way, no ML or trying to predict what I want - I'm just going to give it some keywords.

Now matching a keyword to a post can benefit from some nlp, and that'd be fine. Something simple like tf-idf should probably be enough. As long as the recall is close 100%, low precision is okay.

Leveraging https://hackyournews.com for the dehyped titles and article summaries would help even more, and probably allow the keywords to surface more consistently.

(tangent) as you are running this on a copy of Arc, is Arc still under development ? Or is that Bel ?

My little schemer book is only two down in my book pile by my bed and so I was wondering ...

This looks bad on mobile and has the classic “desktop zoomed out view”. Looks like it must be missing the correct HTML meta properties. Should be an easy fix.

Yeah, I know. I'll get round to making it look good on mobile.

It would be nice with a mobile adapted version. theres a lot of low hanging fruit you can improve if you’re forking the original HN GUI. Good work!

Yes. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37888305

Love it, just earned a spot in my bookmark toolbar.

same

I think https://www.vogons.org has the PC/DOS/Windows 9x parts already covered, it might be best to concentrate on non-x86 retrocomputing & gaming instead.

I think you have to keep the mission of your site easy to understand

"retrocomputing news" is easy to understand

"retrocomputing news except PC, DPS, Windows 9x" is not easy to understand

On the topic of retro computing and gaming: I really want to make retro computer games, but without the retro computer environment. Things like PICO-8 are great but lean heavily on making the whole experience retro.

Do Hacker News for X ever work?

It's too hard to bootstrap a community, hence most fail.

The Hacker News for X is Hacker News.

It works over HTTP (no S) so it's also usable on retro devices. Nice.

I love it!

I visited the site, clicked the first article I found interesting, and it sent me to YouTube. HN never seems to send me to YouTube which is a plus.

A large proportion of retro computing content is created for YouTube.

To the point I would say anyone currently engaged with retro computing content is probably less adverse to YouTube.

Physical engagement with actual retro computers is a different case.

HN predates the current status of YouTube and has attracted an audience of readers and writers, I think.

Awesome website! Honestly I do believe there is audience large enough to sustain a hn for retro computing and gaming. Truth be told a lot of those types of posts get drowned out here by business and programming posts.

thank you for bringing this to my attention!

And you’re posting it here so that C64 enthusiasts can have inane discussions about JavaScript frameworks?

Lots of comments about how to improve the project and the “secret sauce” of Hacker News.

The real secret to Hacker News is the ability to attract a large target audience on an ongoing basis to view and contribute. It is the most difficult part of most software projects and especially social ones. Every HN-like project needs to have a plan around this. Andrew Chen explains it well in his book “The Cold Start Problem”.

Here’s the PDF version of that book - nice of the author to publish it for free http://andrewchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ColdStartPr...

> The real secret to Hacker News is the ability to attract a large target audience on an ongoing basis to view and contribute.

This might be a good time to mention voat. It was a better reddit than reddit, it had a superior UX, it performed better as well, but ultimately the community was utter shit.

Social networking services are not a technical challenge.

I feel like voat is a lesson that something cannot be a success when its main sales pitch is "It's not [other thing A]"

Well, what was at least in my echo chamber considered to be the inofficial sales pitch of Facebook was "It's not MySpace".

Similarly for Reddit: "It's not Digg".

So in my opinion B's sole marketing pitch "It's not [other thing A]" can work if B is considered to be the new cool kid in town.

Reddit was a great community with its own character and norms prior to the great Digg exodus. It mostly managed to hold onto them, at least while it still made some kind of sense to think about reddit as one community vs. 10,000 subreddits.

They each had an AND attached to it that made them better.

Facebook was just like MySpace AND everyone at your university is on it (which then became timeline/news feed, and chat was added, etc.)

Reddit was just like digg (front page of the internet) AND had thousands of niche communities you could connect to

Voat was just like Reddit but had no AND that caused users to stick around. Discord is more of a threat because it is a community hub AND it provides live chat, voice channels, video sharing, etc.

Software clones are easy. Providing that AND is what makes companies stand apart and thrive

I don't think it's a valid take. If the incumbent is doing a shit job and pushing it's entire userbase always, providing the same service without being shit is definitely a good sales pitch.

It definitely didn't perform better. Each page request would do a giant N+1 query for all the comments and it frequently went down due to load.

quantifying technical achievements is a lot easier than qualifying policy changes.

X amount of views, X amount of subs, etc.

Removing problem people.

Also strict rules/culture and paid fulltime moderators/curators.

This. Dang (Daniel) is a cyborg, meant in the best possible way. He moderates this place better than anywhere else on the internet that I know of.

That’s a low bar though.

I have scraped the comments here at random. There’s plenty of “violations” that are missed.

This comment feels like confirmation bias relative to my measure.

That people believe it’s a certain type of forum likely plays as much or more of a role than moderation. It intentionally does not function like Reddit or Twitter and that makes obvious what content is favored.

I don't agree at all that whole-site moderation is a "low bar".

best in class is not a low bar

The two together are key. There are many subreddits which had a great culture but mods went underwater when the sub hit ~100k, the point where every sub becomes closer to the norm. And obviously you can't just pay a mod to create something special, it takes two.

Yes, network effects is a fascinating concept and only very few products can figure it out. Please HN, never change :)

you're just in the pot as the water warms. Take a critical look at HN now vs. 10 years ago; it has change immensly. The key question is has the core integrity of the original project been violated? That's less clear.

There are other key questions that could be asked to. Like, has it improved over 10 years?

I’d say yes. The breadth, range and typical tone of articles has changed. You still come across content that has stuffy tone.

>Please HN, never change :)

Well, it has grown quite a lot since the early days so that inevitably makes it a target for some groups.

I agree that HN's deliberate design to foster an endless September is unusual.

I suspect full time professional development and moderation also plays a role.

Also, starting as a passion project of a competent programmer with decades of experience.

I hope Two Stop Bits thrives, but I suspect full time professional staff is a long shot.

Hope I am wrong.

It does make me wish that HN somehow “spoke to” mastodon/other activity pub servers or something. I wouldnt mind the posts that float up to the front page here coming up in other places.

Thankfully the people that post here do tend to be people using federated social media as well haha

Plenty of HN bots on Mastodon already, e.g. I follow this one: https://social.lansky.name/@hn500

> The real secret to Hacker News is the ability to attract a large target audience on an ongoing basis to view and contribute

Attracting audiences is easy. I can create a website right now and get hundreds of people on it today. Keeping them around is what really matters.

HN has excellent moderation. That's the secret sauce. Otherwise people would have bounced already.

Nearly all the threads are 0 comments. I don’t think moderation is the problem. It really is hard to build an audience.

> Andrew Chen explains it well in his book “The Cold Start Problem”.

"Chapter 1: 'Venture Capital', or Kindling"

The secret to Hacker News is that someone is paying for a full time admin years after years, without displaying 3rd party ads.

Check if you can do that too.

> without displaying 3rd party ads.

Though technically they do show first-party ads, as pointed out by another comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37889072

Which isn’t that bad. On a smaller scale it’s like a blog author who promotes their own book. It means the ads can be fairly unobtrusive and not mine you for data, while at the same time being highly targeted to a specific audience.

Discussion forums are often run as passion projects, and many have been around for years.

While something the size of Hacker News almost certainly needs a paid admin, something smaller and more focused can still be a worthy community.

You make it sound as if that was goodwill, but there's money in that, I believe.

I'm not saying that the money is full reason, but at least partial.

HN creates visibility for YC startups, e.g. by placing Launch HN posts or the so-and-so is hiring posts

Ahhh this is the puzzle piece I was missing

Seems like this idea is well within the capability of one person to run and moderate it for free / fun in their spare time.

I believe this to be erroneous.

Read this New Yorker profile of dang: https://archive.ph/czYVG

"... for free/fun in their spare time."?

My respect for dang is enormous. I would love a peek behind the curtain. I have no idea how this site maintains the quality it does. I see only a fraction of the work Dan does and I can only think he lives in some weird quantum bubble where he has 489 hours in every day.

Absolutely not. Even a facebook group of < 100k is too much work for a single person to manage especially if it is discussion based.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com