Show HN: A better Hacker News front end | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A better Hacker News front end

hakkernieuws.vercel.app

38 pointsAntonioEritas77 comments

I forked pajecawav's better-hn repo, which turned out to be an excellent foundation to build on. While the original implementation was clean and functional, it didn't quite capture the essence of Hackernews. More importantly, it was missing some features I considered essential for a truly viable alternative.

After tinkering with it for a while, I think I've nailed it—at least for my own use case. If it works well for me, chances are others might find it useful too. So I figured, why not share it?

Pretty straightforward: no ads, no tracking, no monetization schemes and no intention to do so. Just a simple deployment on Vercel's free tier, which costs me exactly nothing. I'm not expecting millions of users (let's be realistic), but we'll see how it scales if people actually start using it.

Any feedback is welcome, or just use it.

Open articleView on HN

I don’t think this is better. Mind you I opened this on my phone.

Overall there is too little space for the titles and the space there is, is given to the branding of the source, so favicon and domain.

I believe the focus should be the content. The hn community overall is quite good at filtering out the nonsense, so if you go to the homepage there will be quality content and having to filter out based on source is not necessary for me.

The approach taken in your design is similar to a search engine where filtering on source credibility or appropriateness IS necessary.

While it looks “modern” I think your redesign proves that flash does not equal good UX

I think I fixed a lot of issues which will make your experience a lot better. Also, creating something modern/flashy wasn't the goal. I think it looks clean and simple, with some modern readability enhancements.

For me, the only lacking feature of vanilla HN is dark mode. I wish they'd add that. Other than that, it's perfect.

Dark Reader extension does wonders for me.

I keep pointing this out every time dark mode comes up, so don't take it personally: embedded browsers (like the ones in RSS readers) cannot use extensions, and only native dark mode support in the site itself works there. It is _extremely_ annoying to get a white flash while reading news in the night time, and I really don't get why HN doesn't have a pair of CSS lines that would fix it for everyone.

The latest version of Qt WebEngine supports both userscripts and extensions.

But embedded browsers could always inject their own userscript for dark mode, so I don't really see the problem.

You don't use iOS, do you?

Are you using iOS, or is iOS using you?

Just tried it and it makes the vote buttons disappear (mobile Safari).

Seems to work fine for me on firefox and chromium:

https://0x0.st/KQVm.png

I really do not understand why they don't.

Me neither. It's a running joke of sorts.

Given how pedantic and cargo-culty the HN community can be about even the tiniest detail of the layout here, it doesn't surprise me that the mods don't make it a priority. The arguments about implementation details and edge cases would be ceaseless, and people would clutch their pearls about HN "turning into Reddit."

Also dark mode seems way too modern a feature for a forum whose entire aesthetic is frozen in the 1990s. Dark mode doesn't directly improve the signal to noise ratio or quality of conversation.

Maybe the best solution is to just let everyone use whatever plugins or browser scripts they want to and leave HN as it is.

Like I keep pointing out time and time again, when I read HN through an RSS reader the embedded browser cannot run extensions and I get a white flash in the middle of the night when I click over.

I don't know what to tell you. Dark mode is probably never going to happen unless you make it happen. Squint or something, I guess.

In my earliest days of using the Web, I used lynx. The text was light grey, and the background was black, for that was what my system defaulted to and I liked it well-enough.

Later, I used Netscape. Some of the more prominent settings[1] were for default colors: For text, links, visited links, and background. I very quickly made it white on black (but kept the blue/purple links unchanged).

But that was just me attempting to stick to my own familiarities.

For most others, the default background in those days was also not white; it was instead grey (#c0c0c0, [2], [3]).

Backgrounds defaulted to grey with Netscape all the way to the end, with Netscape Communicator 4.8 still defaulting to grey [4] at its 2002 release. Mosaic was also consistently grey [except for on the Macintosh], and so was IBM's WebExplorer (the forgotten independently-developed web browser that shipped with their forgotten desktop operating system).

Even Internet Explorer remained grey by default until the release of version 4, in the last half of 1997. [5]

But you're right, of course: There's no need for dark (or grey) mode here on HN. It's a simple-enough affair for a person of sufficient wit to change it to whatever they want, in-browser, here in 2025.

---

[1]: https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_Link_Appearance.h...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302205

[3]: https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/reports/soasis-slides/colors.html

[4]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Netscape_Communicato...

[5]: https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20110330_ie_history/

IMO, Hackernews's value is the comment section.

Some things I wish it had while reading comments:

- keyboard shortcut to go to next/previous comment at same level (`j`/`k` a la vim?)

- keyboard shortcut to upvote a comment while it is selected

- memory of which comments I already read, so that when I come back to a comment section, I can navigate directly to the unread comments (useful for conversations that span multiple hours/days). Perhaps also styling read comments differently.

I too wish hacker news had that by default. I use this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vihn/

Compared to lobster.rs there's another useful feature that I miss: unread messages in a thread

Could this (in theory) be achieved with a per-user "load css from url" field?

I found stylus to work really well for this.. I have most of my apps typically in Nord palette. For some frequently visited websites, such as HN, I apply the Nord theme. Not sure if it was already built by someone else, but something I found chatbots are quite good at is creating custom CSS! I point it at a website and ask for a Nord themed customs CSS. Copy Paste into Stylus... most sites I tried it oneshotted a very decent solution.

I find the favicons needlessly distracting and unhelpful. I suspect we probably use different parts of the brain for processing images and text, so it's a lot of different information at once.

My main gripes with HN UI are the expand/collapse and voting buttons are tiny on mobile. And it's very easy to accidentally hide an article by accident (it's a hassle to undo this).

First impression: this is strictly worse. Way too much space between everything (even between lines in paragraphs!) means fewer stories visible on screen, and fewer comments visible. Enormous pointless spaces between comments, grey comment text is harder to read. Site links on stories don't link to site's stories. Data is out of date.

1) Get rid of all the margins. I'm not here to look at postcards, I'm here to read text. old.reddit is good.

2) Font is too small and light. Make subject font much bigger. The 2nd line is not nearly as important as the title, so title should be much bigger. (your darkmode is better at this than light mode). Personally I prefer Verdana to AppleSystemFont as the latter is very light.

1+2) The posting page has too much vert space between posts and too small font. I'm here for the text.

3) I don't care about icons. They don't help me to decide "do I want to read this posting".

My layout design: https://imgur.com/a/uBPb2pC

Both 1+2 are partially fixed by hitting my browser's "zoom in" function 3 to 4 times. But still there's too much whitespace.

I don't know why so many sites default to tiny fonts and using fixed margins to restrict content to a tiny column down my screen. Fortunately, most browsers allow you to set a minimum font size, which fixes a lot of these sites.

I've fat fingered the "hide" button quite often when I was trying to hit the comments button. That's the main thing that I find slightly annoying about the default HN layout

> More importantly, it was missing some features I considered essential for a truly viable alternative.

As others here noted, I can't find any noteworthy addition (actually none? maybe I'm not very observant) to the features the actual HN has. I'd appreciate a more thorough explanation of this.

A UI refresh is certainly not a bad idea (although the existing content density is hard to match), but this "modern" UI looks like the average Bootstrap website from 10 years ago with a few extra shadows and transparency. I enabled Javascript to test the theme switching and discovered that scrolling becomes very laggy (on a phone). Perhaps you're accidentally running some animation? It feels very unnatural.

Negative feedback, viewing on a Linux PC with Firefox:

1. It lacks density where HN excels at density. It is my opinion that it has way too much negative space, and that I do not care if my opinion flies in the face of modern web design ethos. (I do not come to HN because my scroll-finger lacks exercise.)

2. It includes tiny little icons that I cannot discern without careful attention. At best, this is distracting and represents additional complexity that provides no positive value.

Positive feedback:

1. The pages do seem to load fast, and that's certainly a welcome consistency.

Other thoughts:

1. If the best it accomplishes is that parts of it stay the same, but other parts get worse, then: It isn't better. It is worse. Change for the sake of change is usually a non-starter, in my opinion.

My hacker news modified with violentmonkey: https://vercel-html-example.vercel.app/hn-violentmonkeys.png

The + - buttons on the top panel change the font size of every thing except the font size of the panel.

Things are arranged to minimize the page scrolling.

The news title and number of comments are darker and a little bit bigger than other elements for an easy reading.

Do you mind sharing the script?

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name        ycombinator
    // @namespace   Violentmonkey Scripts
    // @match       https://news.ycombinator.com/*
    // @grant       GM_addStyle
    // @version     1.0
    // @author      -
    // @description 10/5/2022, 6:35:39 PM
    // ==/UserScript==

    GM_addStyle(`
      .pagetop { color: #fff }
      body .title { font: 19px/1.5 sans-serif }
      body a, body a:link { color: #222 }
      body .comhead { font-size: 16px; font-style: italic }
      body .title .rank { color: #aaa; font-size: 14px }
      body .subtext { font-size: 16px; padding: 4px 0 6px 19px }
      .c00, .c00 a:link { color: #444 } body .comment { font: 16px/1.45 sans-serif; max-width: none }
      body span.pagetop a, body span.pagetop a:visited { color: #fff }
      body tr.athing:not(.comtr):nth-child(even) { background: linear-gradient(#f4f4f4, #eee, #f4f4f4) }
      body tr.athing > td { padding: 5px 10px 5px 1px }
      body tr.athing > td.votelinks { padding-right: 5px }
      td.zoom { font-weight: 700; color: #fff; width: 32px }
      td.zoom > span { cursor: pointer; font-size: 1.5rem }
      div.toptext { font-size: 17px; color: #333 }
      span.number-of-comments { font-size: 18px; color: #666 }
    `);

    const t = document.getElementById('hnmain');
    if (t != null) {
      t.removeAttribute('bgcolor');
      t.removeAttribute('width');
      t.parentNode.removeChild(t);
      document.body.prepend(t);
    }

    const spanPagetop = document.querySelector('td span.pagetop');
    if (spanPagetop) {
      const tr = spanPagetop.parentElement.parentElement;
      tr.insertAdjacentHTML('afterbegin', `
        <td class="zoom"><span onclick="zoomIn(); return false">+</span></td>
        <td class="zoom"><span onclick="zoomOut(); return false">-</span></td>
      `);
    }

    setTimeout(function() {
      while (true) {
        const td = document.querySelector('tr:not([id]) > td.subtext');
        if (td == null) {
          break;
        }

        const tr = td.parentElement;
        const previousTr = tr.previousElementSibling;
        if (previousTr != null) {
          tr.parentElement.removeChild(tr);
          previousTr.append(td);
        } else {
          break;
        }
      }

      while (true) {
        const tr = document.querySelector('tr.spacer');
        if (tr == null) {
          break;
        }
        tr.parentElement.removeChild(tr);
      }

      document.querySelectorAll('td.title[valign="top"]').forEach(td => td.setAttribute('valign', 'middle'));

      document.querySelectorAll('table > tbody > tr:has(> td + td + td + td) + tr + tr > td[colspan="2"]:first-child + td:last-child').forEach(td => {
        td.setAttribute('colspan', '2');
      });

      document.querySelectorAll('a[href^="item?id="]').forEach(a => {
        const arr = a.innerHTML.split('&nbsp;');
        if (arr.length == 2) {
          a.innerHTML = `<span class="number-of-comments">${arr[0]}</span> ${arr[1]}`;
        }
      });
    }, 419);

    const myScript = document.createElement('script');
    myScript.innerHTML = `
      const FONT_SIZE_THRESHOLD = 26.9;
      function zoomIn() {
        const bodyTitle = document.querySelector('body .title');
        if (bodyTitle) {
          const newFontSize = parseFloat(getComputedStyle(bodyTitle).getPropertyValue('font-size').replace('px', '')) + 1;
          document.querySelectorAll('body .title').forEach(t => {
            t.style.fontSize = newFontSize + 'px';
            if (newFontSize > FONT_SIZE_THRESHOLD) t.style.fontWeight = 300;
          });
        }
        const bodyComment = document.querySelector('body .comment');
        if (bodyComment) {
          const newFontSize = parseFloat(getComputedStyle(bodyComment).getPropertyValue('font-size').replace('px', '')) + 1;
          document.querySelectorAll('body .comment').forEach(t => {
            t.style.fontSize = newFontSize + 'px';
            if (newFontSize > FONT_SIZE_THRESHOLD) t.style.fontWeight = 300;
          });
        }
      }

      function zoomOut() {
        const bodyTitle = document.querySelector('body .title');
        if (bodyTitle) {
          const newFontSize = parseFloat(getComputedStyle(bodyTitle).getPropertyValue('font-size').replace('px', '')) - 1;
          if (newFontSize > 12) document.querySelectorAll('body .title').forEach(t => {
            t.style.fontSize = newFontSize + 'px';
            if (newFontSize < FONT_SIZE_THRESHOLD) t.style.fontWeight = 400;
          });
        }
        const bodyComment = document.querySelector('body .comment');
        if (bodyComment) {
          const newFontSize = parseFloat(getComputedStyle(bodyComment).getPropertyValue('font-size').replace('px', '')) - 1;
          if (newFontSize > 12) document.querySelectorAll('body .comment').forEach(t => {
            t.style.fontSize = newFontSize + 'px';
            if (newFontSize < FONT_SIZE_THRESHOLD) t.style.fontWeight = 400;
          });
        }
      }
    `;
    document.head.appendChild(myScript);

With normal HN, on the phone I get 12 items from home page. Your version shows me 10.

Overall it has 'more' spacing. Which I don't feel I need: I appreciate the high density of original.

did you add any 'additional' features? stuff lile 'kill file', per commemt bookmark/tag, different search features ( 'more like this', 'best of the day comments based on your liking') would gives some reason to switch

Note that the HN hivemind loves crammed, almost unreadable text content, so the feedback you're getting is more than expected.

From my part I see this kind of exercises quite often, but I happen to like this exercise. Actual good content density and the favicons are actually a good idea since they let you know where a link would take you to.

The only downside I saw (for me) is that article titles, in the article pages, are too big.

Personally, I like it. However, I like being able to comment and upvote more. At the same time, I'd be reluctant to say the least to hand over my login credentials. It could be quite cool to see this turned into a FOSS RES-style browser extension. Or maybe even a commercial product. I already paid for the HACK app.

idk how you would define "no tracking", but this is using vercel insights, a tracking tool.

altought i prefer the default HN interface, i think the ui is generally fine and you did a good job and avoided overengineering.

with a text heavy page like HN, the most important thing is imo to carefully choose a font family and font properties (line-height, letter-spacing, etc.). as is, the default HN does a better job with this but leaves a lot of room for improvement as well.

personally, i'm using a few lines of css to add dark mode to default HN and zoom in to 125% cause the default font-size ist too small for me (an old person).

Not better at all, we don't need flashy UI, we need better content focus

Not better IMO but I can appreciate the attempt. Seems messier than the real thing. The icons don't really do anything to help. Takes more time to read.

Spacing between comments is pretty wide. Gives me that feeling when they redesign a site and everything is spaced our 2x more than it was before. Some text feels too small at default zoom.

Also you followed original HN here making clicked on links grey, ive always found it annoyingly hard to quikcly spot them in the list after they get turned grey.

Thanks for sharing this

I've just used Algolia's view for filtering and sorting. Much nicer.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=1&prefix=fals...

So what's worse/better? What did u fix? What didn't u fix?

All this description says that it's better for you. Why? What could be improved?

I mostly check HN on my phone. Harmonic is awesome for this, and I can definitely tell you why it's better for phones.

- Nice filtering - infinite scroll - local bookmarking - rich UI for actions

Please, no. Just bloating it up with additional style elements and mushing it visually is not a big win exactly

The comment section not being collapsible is my main pain point. Just wished I could skim the top three most voted top level comments and then look at others. Instead I get sucked into this wilderness of a single thread and never quite easily viewing other top level threads

It's more attractive, but a little less readable. I would call it different but not better.

I think it looks nice, but:

- Scrolling is unbearable on Firefox/Android.

- The icons are way too "noisy" I would remove them. Also, posts without icon look "misplaced".

Other than that looks pretty nice. The dark mode is awesome. Don't let the angry mob bring you down ;)

Update: Fixed a lot of issues, also based on all your feedback - Better readability and alignment - Icon toggle - Past feature - Much more under the hood to make it even more secure and faster.

Opened it on mobile. UI looks more modern of course, but scrolling is just plain horrible.

I like the bigger touch targets in the header for mobile, but the infinite scroll hurts me, pages introduce natural stopping points and mean the header is always nearby.

(I appreciate that it's Load More instead of automatic infinite scroll, but still!)

I have pain points but still like the way the site looks like something from the 1990’s. I’d like to keep it that way. And please write it in arc or some other lisp dialect. The last thing I want to see on this site is JavaScript.

Curious why you think it’s better? There’s a trend in software design to think “modernizing” a UI equates to make software better when on most objective measures it makes things worse, been guilty of it myself!

Looks nice. Need to be able to comment. That’s the whole point of HN

I still believe https://hckrnews.com/ is the peak

Agreed. I like being able to quickly see what is new since the last I visited so that I'm not re-reading the same headlines.

Good effort — I like it.

Is it better or not is a subjective thing. Don't get discouraged by some of the comments posted here.

Way too much spacing between comments.

Fixed!

The headers are lost in the design amongst all the extra negative space and increased font sizes

This is better because it has dark mode. Yo Y-comb when we getting dark mode?

how do you like my hackernews frontend: https://news.facts.dev/

Its laggy on mobile

Fixed!

Some info explaning why it is better would be nice!

I prefer the existing one. What I like about existing one is how simple the titles are to read. They are strong contrast above everything else. Yours has icons that take away focus, and not as much contrast between the meta info etc.

It is a bit in similar direction like Old Reddit (good) to New Reddit (terrible).

Asceticism of HN is a feature, not a bug

Even tinier font? Basic, basic failure.

I can easily make it bigger, and it does not break on my smartphone as the original site.

What's not broken is easily fixed.

Font size is one of my biggest bugbears with HN, as well as the terrible colour contrast on downvoted posts.

I scratched my itch with a custom UserScript

https://github.com/mgladdish/website-customisations/tree/mai...

I'm particularly pleased with how quotes are rendered - I wouldn't go back to 'default' HN now.

how is this better?

rounded corners!——joking, just looking for myself

besides being too difficult to read..

When Rob Malda introduced rounded corners on Slashdot over a quarter of a century ago using HTML tables and GIFs (sadly, I couldn't find a link), that sure did seem neat.

But that was... over a quarter a century ago. :)

On mobile, with typical username length, comments with even one level of indentation have the heading-line wrap, which is just one of many of the problems with the “making everything take vastly more space” layout, at least on mobile.

Maybe this is exclusively intended for desktop?

What I think is better:

- Dark mode feature

- search might be useful.

What I think is worse:

- More spacing

- Menu missing threads, past, comments, jobs and submit.

- Icon buttons.

Possibly unpopular opinion, but I think text based buttons are much faster to locate while icons require more effort to understand. Icons only make sense to you when you already know what it is supposed to represent

Its really good modern, loved it. Don't get disappointed with people's comments

It’s many times better, but the original website is so mediocre that any implementation is better at something, at least. I’m getting a good laugh reading all this ‘the original is so good’ praises. Just increase the font sizes on mobile and see how it’s broken.

Yeah, that's why I created this in the first place. The original sucks and I want to use something better, which is just as fast, but better looking. The fontsize, layout, colors are really bad in the original.

I think they're afraid to improve it because a lot of people are attached to the original version and will freak out (see all the comments lol).

They simply don’t care, except for censoring the narratives they don’t like to be discussed. Plus utilising the masses when they want to advertise something to them. All in all, I’m wondering why I waste my time here.

By the way, I like your implementation and use it from now on. Hope it’ll be active for some time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com