Hacker Newsy: a pretty Hacker News client | Hacker News Reader

Hacker Newsy: a pretty Hacker News client

github.com

39 pointsthunderbong53 comments

Pretty is very subjective but personally only seeing 7 vs. 27 links isn't really the information density I'm looking for when scanning the front page.

PS: The comment link isn't clickable, which is usually the first thing I'm clicking when looking at the front page.

Yeah the mobile version has too much wasted space and the text is too big IMO.

Desktop version is not much better either, manages to fit only 9 links.

Then again, would you say that the information density of hacker news main page and in particular the font size is appropriate for mobile devices?

I primarily use HN on my phone and have no issues with the density. In fact, I wish more mobile sites were like this.

I loathe the mobile experience on sites like CNBC where there’s low density and stock photos for each headline. It takes multiple scrolls to see all the headlines.

Font size for text and titles are ok, but links are too small, I developed tap anxiety as I frequently miss click things. But that’s not the worst part, navigating through huge threads of comments is. I would like to see all root comments first and then decide what thread is worth expanding, not being forced to collapse threads I’m not interested in.

Try this: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/39132453

I have a bookmarklet that toggles between hw.leftium.com and news.ycombinator.com

(If you click on a comment's timestamp, you can see the top level replies to that comment in the same way)

For me its too small on desktop too but luckily zooming in at 140% works perfectly.

The font size is fine, but buttons and links are way too small, especially vote buttons.

There are so many HN front ends. It feels like a new one gets created every 6 months. Yet for all of its subjective “ugliness”, I still find the original HN site to be largely excellent enough already.

I genuinely think the only thing I would change about HN would be the difficulty of voting on a touchscreen; the targets are too small.

But, since it's easy to rectify after the fact, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I just use the zoom feature. Although most of the time the target is large enough anyways.

The only thing I would change is adding a `manifest.json` so that I could treat it as an app instead of a website.

Yeah usually I find these things make HN worse and not better. I’ve never found one that raises beyond net neutral

The one change I’d make is keeping track of what I’ve read or not in a thread. I understand that the lack of this feature is a conscious choice but I disagree. I use a browser plugin

Also accidentally clicking on flag or hide for the story above the one you are trying to tap!

Is there any way to undo hide? You can unflag and undown, but if you accidentally hit hide, that’s it.

In your profile, there's a "hidden" link to a list of the links you've hidden. You can unhide them.

(Note that afaics if you don't have any hidden links, the "hidden" link in your profile won't appear. The link will be among the various "comments", "submissions", etc links in your profile.)

Is there a list somewhere? I'd like to filter based on the domain of the outgoing link.

Couldn’t you catch the popular ones by looking in your logs for correlated bumps in traffic anytime you’re on the front page?

If that’s not good enough, trawling through HN Algolia search is probably the best way, since they’re almost surely going to have been announced on HN.

You can do that with a userscript, no need for an entire new client.

Just in case if anyone is already using uBlock Origin and don't know, the css style can also be modified with a filter (I noticed the feature existence through HN comment some mounts ago. Procedural filters are also allowed).

I like the original HN so I use it just fot tinny details, but for other users necessities and only just in case if they find it useful or didn't know, it more or less would be (not complete),

links scale

   news.ycombinator.com##a:style(font-size: 12pt; !important;)
   news.ycombinator.com##.comhead a:style(font-size: 8pt; !important;)

or button scale

   news.ycombinator.com##.votearrow:style(transform: scale(1.5) !important;)

or font scale

   news.ycombinator.com##.comment:style(font-size: 12pt !important;)

My wish list for an alternate front end is one that automatically swaps the main article with archive.is and nitter.net links. These are often posted as comments so readers don't need to log in. HN used to have a web link, adding it back would be great.

This userscript will be of use to you then https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall

You might find these useful, not just for HN but elsewhere:

Bypass paywalls: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

Auto Nitter/Invidious/etc: https://libredirect.github.io/

If anyone else here is using Harmonic it has an option to swap for Nitter.

Nitter is dead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39161162

Hacker News is pretty already. The only tweak I apply is to enlarge fonts to 120% on desktop, and dark mode.

But I don't particularly think it needs Arial fonts and more padding.

> Hacker News is pretty already. The only tweak I apply is to enlarge fonts to 120% on desktop, and dark mode.

Hah, same! That way the information density is just perfect.

I personally think it looks really good! I like the color scheme and the way each element looks together with the font. It also fits quite nicely with the original Hackernews “brand”.

I found it a bit unintuitive though that I couldn’t click on comments and also found the spacing between links a bit too large for my taste.

Maybe it’s intentional but things are far larger on a phone. It only shows 3 stories, where the “non-pretty” client shows 8. It’s also really weird that click on an article leads to the comments on HN rather than the actual article. Like, why would I be interested in the comments for something I haven’t read first?

I’m not sure I think it’s prettier, at least not on the front page on mobile. It looks a little like some sort of vision disability mode, which I guess is nice for some people, but big things aren’t necessarily pretty to me.

> It’s also really weird that click on an article leads to the comments on HN rather than the actual article. Like, why would I be interested in the comments for something I haven’t read first?

I've been using link aggregation sites in this way (comments->link) for many years now.

Depending on the platform I either open both the comments and link at the same time into tabs, or I open just the comments and then click the link.

I'm not typically reading the comments first (though I am skimming them, so paywall notices, cache links, etc. are typically found before even trying to load the link). Instead, the main benefit I've found to the workflow is being able to quickly and easily return to comments about that story. When the frontpage has a high rate of turnover it can be difficult or time consuming to go back and find the original submission/comments. Whereas if they are already open or within the browser history stack, things are much easier to track.

I often read just the HN comments, without ever looking at the article!

The comments often provide a great "preview:" a short summary and/or let me know if the article is worth reading.

Other times, I'm just more interested in the discussion related to the topic more than the article itself.

That's why https://hw.leftium.com dropped the links doesn't even link to the article; I always open the comments first, then (maybe) open the article in the background while I read the comments.

Nice but I just use a Chrome extension (Stylish) that has tons of styles for many websites.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/stylish-custom-them...

I use HackerNew Chrome extension [0] but the web reigns supreme when it comes to reading HN but that's about as far as I go. I've always felt the 3rd party "clients" to just feels off, not to mention missing certain features they just can't provide (karma or sometimes voting). Even on mobile where I use HACK and Octal they sometimes fall short and I just go open the website in Safari since it's more powerful.

[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hackernew/lgoghlndi...

Here's another extension you may be interested in[0]. It allows total customization if you don't mind writing a bit of HTML, though it ships with some decent defaults. It's also not 1:1 feature complete with HN but it suits my needs just fine.

[0] https://github.com/dan-lovelace/hacker-news-pro

We don't need new design on the front end, we could use more small features on the existing site. For years, I've been collecting a list of stuff I'd like to see. Most of it can all be built with a browser extension. It is really too bad that `Refined Hacker News` was poorly coded, and now abandoned. Some day, I'd love to resurrect it.

Do you have that list somewhere you can share? I made an extension to be able to reply inline, I'd love to implement more in it.

I do, but I'm not willing to share it yet. It is one of those projects I'd like to take up on my own some day when I'm "retired".

This fork has the necessary fixes in it to keep it working, and has inline reply implemented: https://github.com/lookfirst/refined-hacker-news/tree/main

The issue is that the way the author coded up the extension is really "wrong"... it is mostly just hacking at the DOM instead of building a data model and then applying that to the DOM.

'a pretty' might better be 'another'? Because there are already many and 'pretty' is subjective ;)

I like it! Thank you for making it available and bonus point for it to be WPA.

I won't be using it because as many others have pointed out, it still need to be refined, but overral looks like quite a good job.

I really like glider on mobile, but only the old design. I've stopped updates because the new one wastes so much space :(

Luckily there isn't really a need for updates.

Am I the only one that finds a sorted-by-time front-page more fascinating than custom styling?

I have been browsing via https://hckrnews.com/ for years now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest is sorted by time.

(I find it nowhere near as interesting as the more curated default list.)

That's a sorted by time slushpile, not a sorted by time frontpage.

I think hn frontend is the only place safe from appraisal and delivery driven tech. Do something, deliver something.

Why no spacing between paragraphs in a comment? Looks weird.

I guess everyone has a different idea as to "pretty"

I would peesonally love to see Tinder-like client for HN.

Left swipe - save to favourites, right swipe - next article.

I like the original much more. Same thing with all other "better hacker news" stuff.

Very nice. Addresses the biggest issue on mobile which is the tap targets are tiny. Great job!

It’s really difficult to click into the comments on mobile

whatever reason hacker news chooses not to make the buttons larger on mobile doesn't make sense to me.

Wait... did that just happen? The buttons getting increased in size?

I might be trippin but the buttons look bigger on my screen than they used to.

Nice, but https://hckrnews.com/ is still the best one, by far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com