I prefer the version of Hacker News from four months ago to the current version, and all of the viewers listed here, even on mobile. I wouldn't think my opinion would be niche.
Weird stuff like collapsing downvoted comments (and their replies) by default. I even browse with showdead on, so I don't want to have to manually expand comment trees just because slightly more people disagree than agree with the point being made.
They don't want you to know the secret to reading HN!
On a more serious note, I'm pretty happy with seeing it right here on this very domain. Hell, I haven't even changed the orange header.
The layout and navigation are simple but intuitive. The site is very light and loads quickly. I don't like how voting will make me jump around the page, but I can live with that. No site is perfect for everyone, after all.
Yeah, I think I'll just keep reading it right here.
I was just about to say the same thing. A few years ago it was a bit annoying to read on mobile, but they eventually made some minor CSS tweaks which made it much better.
Performing certain actions, such as upvoting, require zooming in a lot in order to hit the desired arrow. I'd love to see that improved, but it's hardly a deal-breaker for me.
But that boring web app doesn't even have pretty fonts.
It even has a "next" button, so you can see more than 30 posts, who needs that?
It shows the point count in a smaller greyer font, instead of a big circle, so I can't instinctively choose posts by popularity instead of their headlines.
It doesn't even pull up a random image from the article that might not have anything to do with the actual topic, and display it along with a preview of text, so I can't get distracted and pulled by fundamentally more attractive colorful pictures instead of boring text topics.
It's not written in the newest JavaScript framework, it's just plain old HTML, some simple CSS and Racket making it all run. Racket! That doesn't even have "JS" in its name. What is this, 2013?
Whoever wrote that version clearly doesn't know how Hacker News is meant to be viewed.
ahem
But seriously, the Hacker News site is one of my favorite "news" sites. Simple, clean, no distractions, just headlines.
Also, some of the websites listed in the article are quite useful, like the search engine. Most of the others are simply different ways of reading Hacker News, not "better". Might be better for some people. Not for me.
It's a very clean and easy to read site. The navigation is logical and visible and the text is easy to read. I'm very happy that is hasn't followed the current horrendous trend of large text, infinite scrolling, and no logical structure. I really dislike the current trend and find it a big leap backwards in usability.
I've tried a few of the alternatives, but I always come back to the main HN site. A lot of the alternative sites are laggy; these either cache their DB fetches or simply only refresh on a schedule.
Right now the only thing I'd change, is move the Search box from the bottom of the page to the top - simply because I always forget it's there.
Actually, thought of a second one - a native RSS feed for the '/newist' page - I currently use the feed provided by HNRSS, but it's not realtime.
I found the normal website really hard to use, and have tried using a bunch of third-party skins and userscripts and stuff to make it look better, but they all seemed even worse in some way.
Then i had a revelation and zoomed in 150%, now i'm perfectly happy with the normal site.
I've used the Hacker News Enhancement Suite for the past few years and thought it did just enough things to make the site a tad more usable without going overboard:
I've been making the switch from Chrome to Firefox over the past month, and HNES is the one thing I truly miss that I haven't found a good replacement for.
I'd consider HNES's highlighting of new comments to be nearly essential to reading HN. I don't understand how others can follow long discussions without any indication of what comments have been posted since a previous viewing or refresh. And it doesn't seem to me like it would be a difficult feature to add.
I wish there were a way to display news from a custom time interval, as opposed to always getting news from a fixed interval of time (I think there are three different settings as of now).
If I haven’t visited HN for, say, 6 days, I find it’d be really helpful to be able to display all news from this time period, based on number of upvotes in descending order.
In other words: I’d appreciate complete control over the algorithm that decides which news to display: time interval, minimum upvotes, minimum comment count, upvotes-per-hour, etc.
Shameless plug: I use my own home written app http://tophn.info to keep an eye on the movement of the top news articles during the day, in real time and jump straight to the comments.
Ok, so all of those are for reading, but I don't see any that would allow voting and commenting on HN. It's also the case with pretty much all other HN apps/interfaces I've seen (with notable exception of HN Enhancement Suite, which is a browser extension).
I don't understand why that is. Is there some important rule of HN that disallows any third-party interaction except through the official interface? Or do people simply treat viewing HN as a MVP, and give up after making it?
As it is, those tools seem only useful for HN readers / lurkers, not that much for those of us who participate in discussions here.
There is (or at least was) an API, AFAIK read-only though. I still don't see why one couldn't combine the API and scrapping to get a full read/write interface going.
Or better: why can't HN developers please work on API? Probably brcause building one takes too much effort.... and they don't see reasons to develop one.
Option #1 hckrnews and some of the other options don't disrupt voting or commenting much at all, they're just a bunch of links to the main Hacker News web site: you have to click through to Hacker News to read the comments, so that's how you upvote and/or comment.
Preventing you from upvoting without actually reading the articles and/or comments is probably a good thing.
I would have liked to see widgets and small apps or things instead of just mostly sites. The responsive ones for mobile are nice and I use http://hn.reapp.io myself on my phone.
They didn't even mention haxor-news. This is basically a command-line interface with a lot of features. Maybe there is justifieble objection to the "read Hacker News without the eyestrain"-bit in this case.
I'd like to see some kind of filtering for HN based upon some preferences or, better yet, an ML style system like with Netflix that learns the kinds of stories you're interested in.
I skimmed through the descriptions of the "21 better ways", but didn't see anything that would help you to find the HN articles that you're interested in.
Long time ago, there was a similar service that used push notifications (via now-dead Notifo; they also had emails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720763 but, personally, I felt that pushes were nicer).
I wonder if there's anything that uses Web Push notifications...
I'm sure the lack of this feature is intentional, to prevent back-and-forth arguments and give others a chance to contribute.
Years ago when I read Slashdot, it felt like the bulk of the discussion was the same few regulars, who would reply within minutes to any response they got. That wasn't healthy or informative, I'd prefer not to see the same here.
Because if an active debate is going on in response to my comment, I'd like to be able to participate. But, I'm not so self-centered as to assume that is likely, so I don't normally check.
and at the same time you are ready to receive live updates while eating dinner/taking nr2/attending funeral. You are conceding control over your time(life) to some third party.
1 vote for HackerWeb for your phone. Wish the full HN had collapsible threads - a feature on Reddit I find very useful for traversing long threads without getting "sucked" into a "reply black hole"
Does anyone remember the front-end to HN that categorizes posts according to proper topic categories like "Privacy," "Coding," "Startups," etc. with ML?
I remember it being posted or mentioned in a comment but cannot find where it is.
190 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadOn a more serious note, I'm pretty happy with seeing it right here on this very domain. Hell, I haven't even changed the orange header.
The layout and navigation are simple but intuitive. The site is very light and loads quickly. I don't like how voting will make me jump around the page, but I can live with that. No site is perfect for everyone, after all.
Yeah, I think I'll just keep reading it right here.
What do you mean by that? Voting is handled by AJAX requests, so it shouldn't jump around.
Performing certain actions, such as upvoting, require zooming in a lot in order to hit the desired arrow. I'd love to see that improved, but it's hardly a deal-breaker for me.
It even has a "next" button, so you can see more than 30 posts, who needs that?
It shows the point count in a smaller greyer font, instead of a big circle, so I can't instinctively choose posts by popularity instead of their headlines.
It doesn't even pull up a random image from the article that might not have anything to do with the actual topic, and display it along with a preview of text, so I can't get distracted and pulled by fundamentally more attractive colorful pictures instead of boring text topics.
It's not written in the newest JavaScript framework, it's just plain old HTML, some simple CSS and Racket making it all run. Racket! That doesn't even have "JS" in its name. What is this, 2013?
Whoever wrote that version clearly doesn't know how Hacker News is meant to be viewed.
ahem
But seriously, the Hacker News site is one of my favorite "news" sites. Simple, clean, no distractions, just headlines.
Also, some of the websites listed in the article are quite useful, like the search engine. Most of the others are simply different ways of reading Hacker News, not "better". Might be better for some people. Not for me.
I've tried a few of the alternatives, but I always come back to the main HN site. A lot of the alternative sites are laggy; these either cache their DB fetches or simply only refresh on a schedule.
Right now the only thing I'd change, is move the Search box from the bottom of the page to the top - simply because I always forget it's there.
Actually, thought of a second one - a native RSS feed for the '/newist' page - I currently use the feed provided by HNRSS, but it's not realtime.
Then i had a revelation and zoomed in 150%, now i'm perfectly happy with the normal site.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
Somebody please make that!
If I haven’t visited HN for, say, 6 days, I find it’d be really helpful to be able to display all news from this time period, based on number of upvotes in descending order.
In other words: I’d appreciate complete control over the algorithm that decides which news to display: time interval, minimum upvotes, minimum comment count, upvotes-per-hour, etc.
This comes close to your specs.
https://hn.algolia.com
https://hackerhunt.co/ http://searchhn.com/ https://hnews.xyz/top https://www.taggernews.com/news/ http://hntop.org/ https://hackerhunt.co/
I find several of these quite useful.
I also wrote about how I built it using Vue.js and RethinkDB... https://hackernoon.com/tophn-a-fun-side-project-built-with-v...
I don't understand why that is. Is there some important rule of HN that disallows any third-party interaction except through the official interface? Or do people simply treat viewing HN as a MVP, and give up after making it?
As it is, those tools seem only useful for HN readers / lurkers, not that much for those of us who participate in discussions here.
Even though I have no ill intent and it's just an account on a silly web forum, they shouldn't and it would make me sad if they did.
But I guess the only way to be sure is to write one yourself.
Preventing you from upvoting without actually reading the articles and/or comments is probably a good thing.
I don't need to vote or something, I just want to get rid of uninteresting stuff as fast as easy as possible.
[0]: https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news
https://github.com/rafaelrinaldi/hn-cli
I skimmed through the descriptions of the "21 better ways", but didn't see anything that would help you to find the HN articles that you're interested in.
http://www.hnreplies.com/
Long time ago, there was a similar service that used push notifications (via now-dead Notifo; they also had emails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720763 but, personally, I felt that pushes were nicer).
I wonder if there's anything that uses Web Push notifications...
Years ago when I read Slashdot, it felt like the bulk of the discussion was the same few regulars, who would reply within minutes to any response they got. That wasn't healthy or informative, I'd prefer not to see the same here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675
http://n-gate.com
> Hacker News is an echo chamber focusing on computer posturing and self-aggrandizement.
discussion / highlights: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759706 (March 2017)
Also: $281/month on Patreon
I remember it being posted or mentioned in a comment but cannot find where it is.