Hacker News front page as a site
thefrontpage.dev
thefrontpage.dev
At the same time, I very much dislike the layout. Masonry-style layouts, at least to me, feel more "artsy" than practical. Multiple rows being displayed at once, with the most crucial information being chaotically all over the place instead of arranged in a way that makes it easy to scan it with your eyes, make me feel like I'm bombarded with information. It's very hard to follow along and very easy to miss articles; almost anxiety-inducing, even. There's hardly any point to this on a website; it's not like you're wasting any paper.
Suggestion though: The text is really small and impossible to read at regular zoom. I had to zoom it to 200% to be able to read it. I'd suggest increasing the default text size
Kudos to the author.
except those were laid out by hand with intent, whereas this one just kind of dumps all stories on a masonry board and calls it a day. This is likely why reading a (good) newspaper feels effortless, whereas reading this "forces you to read slowly".
A news sheet from THE olden days (eg Victorian era), looks more like a wall of text, set as tightly -- an uniformly -- as possibly, which is not surprising considering the limitations imposed by the technology of the day.
As for story selection, I think the collective hivemind of hn-ers would be a worthy substitute for an editor in chief.
OP, consider reducing the number of columns from 4 to 3 (at least below very wide viewports), increasing the font size, and then also allowing hyphenation. I think the last will help a lot with the justification problem.
thefrontpage.dev##p.newspaper-copy:style(line-height: normal !important; font-size: 1rem !important;)
thefrontpage.dev##p.article-meta:style(font-size: 1rem !important; font-weight: normal !important; letter-spacing: normal !important;)
I believe at this point pretty much half of the users might have their own client :)
I would love that the size of the article is based on the number of upvotes (hardcoded).
* > 500 => take full width or 3. * 500 > 100 => Show it as right now. * > 100 => Just show the title.
The Front Page highlights a diverse set of tech and science stories"
It is interesting the summary it generated for itself wasn't able to describe itself as a Hacker News content view. It missed the big picture meta context.
And it’s fucking perfect.
Less like good-old newspaper, but instead made for scannability & readability, with discussion highlights for each story.
Any feedback greatly appreciated!
Still though, it takes me back to the original BetaNews.com and how Winamp.com used to do their news.
Anyway, great work :)
This would make it easier to read
The formatting, etc looks all nice, but it's not worth reading.
I’m writing something similar to Moltbook for HN where AIs browse HN’s front page and leave comments. But I wasn’t sure whether AIs could reliably browse an arbitrary website. (Paywalls would break it, as just one example.)
But it seems like your AI works fine for all the sites. If you have time to explain, what exactly do you do to generate your summaries? Thanks!
EDIT: I see that sometimes your summaries fail, e.g. “Ferrari Luce - Summary not available.” It looks like it fails because it’s a JS heavy site. But I was thinking a headless browser could take screenshots of the page and then feed the screenshots to AI. I’m not sure how practical that is to implement though.
Not that summaries are reliable anyway. Big picture, maybe, but poor importance classification (bad at extracting key points). Understandable for this use case but unwilling to read potentially false summaries given risk I go around remembering them (never having read the original piece).