HN Explorer

90 comments

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wrycoder
Very useful. What's your monetization plan? I'd rather pay a small fee than see any ads!
cylo
No monetization plan. Nor is there the temptation to. This isn't really something I built to make money. As mentioned, I built it mostly for myself. Happy to share it with others along the way. :)

It's interesting to see how polarizing it is to some folks.

avereveard
idk when brutalist became synonim of ugly and minimum effort, but I assure you it's not.
hellisothers
I’d say, to the average person the Brutalist aesthetic is certainly synonymous with ugly minimalism.
granitepail
Maybe the backend was written in concrete.
culi
I agree. Just look through some of the listed sites on brutalistwebsites.com[0] and you'll quickly realize most of these designs are NOT easy to pull off

[0] https://brutalistwebsites.com/

jonwinstanley
Yes, and brutalist refers to French word for raw concrete, Brut, not in relation to the adjective Brutal.
cpach
Ugly? I don’t agree. I think it’s a clean and fresh layout. I don’t think it’s incorrect to call it brutalist.
NoGravitas
Brutalism means making the form support the function, and being true to the materials you're using. I'd say this qualifies.
avereveard
Absolutely not, besides, even assuming that brutalism also include function over form, the site isn't true to materials, as links and fonts are obviously fancied up, and the page structure is absolutely hidden in a sea of white. Moreover, the structure is slaved to the content and not the other way around.

lol who donvoted this? you don't need more than two minutes of image search to utterly demolish the notion that brutalism is function over form.

123pie123
Thanks, added as a bookmark

I do like the basic style, not a massive fan of the color, needs better contrast for the text - imho

janfoeh
I'm a fan of no-frills layouts and I do miss the web of old, but this could be easier to read than it is. I like

  body {
    font-family: monospace;
  }

  li {
    color: grey;
    padding-bottom: 0.5rem;
  }

  li a {
    color: blue;
  }
kqr
So basically a web-based RSS reader hardcoded to a few feeds?
abetusk
Very well done, I like this quite a bit
Friday_
Done the similair project in the past, main discovery was that without breaking news headlines, images, font size, color flickering, all the senzationalism was gone from the portal.

Maybe i will next do the opposite, in plain text insert senzationalism, but that's called marketing.

starbase
First impression. I like it. But some sources have 3 or 4 headlines and others have dozens. Perhaps the sources with few headlines could be on a row together (or the next source in a column moved up) to eliminate huge chunks of whitespace.

What if I want different sources, e.g. Babylon Bee instead of (or in addition to) The Onion? Would be great if this is doable without login, just give the custom feed its own URL. Yeah, it would become my own echo chamber but otherwise everyone is stuck with whatever echo chamber you choose.

OK this one isn't old web but it would be sweet if I could select a headline (or word/words within a headline) and see all articles matching that topic. e.g. volcano, or FCC.

culi
A HN user posted a project of theirs that seems to do most of these things:

https://sumi.news/

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
mfontani
Ha! Thanks for including ElReg :)
davidjhall
Like it - reminds me of a cleaner popurls.com. As someone else suggested, would love to custom add sites (via url).
thmorriss
I like this a lot. I set it to open every morning at 8am using an extension :)
awb
Interesting project and appreciate the simple / brutalist layout.

A couple questions:

1) That's a lot of news! Just browsing the headlines would take a long time. Any ideas on how to make it more compact? I'd definitely be interested in a site that could give me 15-30 high quality links per day across a diverse spectrum of content and sources.

2) I personally appreciate the discussion aspect of HN and wouldn't enjoy just visiting the links alone. Any thoughts around including a link back to the original HN discussion?

Thanks for sharing!

cylo
1.) It is a lot! The frontpage in particular is almost overwhelming. Browsing by individual topics makes it a bit more digestible. One element I could support is a parameter you can supply in the URL to limit the amount of articles returned per source. The challenge with providing 15-30 high quality links is the "human editing" element required to do that effectively. I'd like to avoid that if at all possible, as well as not get into the business of harvesting visitors' personal information. There's no tracking or harvesting going on here whatsoever and I intend to keep it that way.

2.) Great idea, I could perhaps add an [hn] tag to those stories to preserve the link to the discussion.

loteck
Love the no tracking mojo, but it would be great if I could be able to "collapse" (equivalent to HN [-]) a site (hide all that site's stories) and have that setting remembered when I come back.

Putting it another way, I'm fine with manually parsing the long list, as long as I can manually exclude whole sites from hitting my eyeballs and have that work remembered next time I visit from the same device.

lostlogin
Re 1): I agree. The source in small writing, then the top 3 stories only? With a drop down if you wanted more?
vorpalhex
I like this, thank you.

Could you make an "api" (maybe just a csv or static json file) available? Alternatively, is it ok if I scrape your page occasionally?

cylo
Thanks. Absolutely, please feel free to scrape. Though that's always a brittle solution. I've added a JSON API to my todo list for it.
NoGravitas
The Drudge Report's headlines look hilarious when rendered in a consistent, normal font size, in a plain unordered list of links. I'm sure the same is true of sensationalist outlets across the political spectrum, but this is the one that stood out to me.

I like it. It won't replace my RSS reader, but it's well done. One thought: could you link to articles on text.npr.org rather than the full-fat NPR site?

A4ET8a8uTh0
I appreciate look and approach ( and not only because I toyed with a similar idea but failed due to editorial work I thought it would need ).

I think this is what people need. I favorited. Keep it up!

bradwood
Politics section is very US-centric and the timestamp defaults to PT.

Would be cool to make it more global in coverage and presentation.

_3jh0
I built something similar a long time ago using deno and deploy.

https://github.com/searchableguy/burger

Although, after trying out different feeds and approaches. I must admit, I don't care about every item that is posted on a news site or someone's blog.

Anything interesting will get posted here.

So I figured I need a way to clean up HN stories that I don't find useful. I built an API server which does this using sentiment analysis.

Another problem I noticed is I tend to click on comments of stories I know won't be any useful (web3?) but it's hard to stop the urge so I check if comments are overly negative and return a score which is used to hide or show the see discussion button.

I also return all the urls from the discussion separately because those are usually good resources.

Meet cabbage news - https://github.com/searchableguy/cabbage_news

I haven't updated the repo so it is probably outdated and that's my first time writing a python application.

Oh here's the block list of keywords I recommend to everyone using HN

https://github.com/searchableguy/cabbage_news/blob/main/app/...

wittjeff
This is a boon for blind and low vision people.
justusthane
There was something similar posted here a couple (few?) years ago, but I think it was curated by hand - can't find it now.

Also worth mentioning https://text.npr.org/ and https://lite.cnn.com/en

ziftface
Maybe you're referring to http://readspike.com? I don't think it's curated, but also aggregates links.
justusthane
Nope. It was much more lo-fi. Basically just a plain-HTML list of headlines/URLs.
goblinux
It immediately reminded me of http://68k.news/

Warning about HTTP; no HTTPS if you're concerned about that sort of thing.

dmje
I like it, but it needs an option to be less. Most obvious way would be a simple filter so you could say "show me the last X minutes / hours" or just the top X headlines. It'd be nice if the layout was a bit more forgiving too - better line spacing, nicer font - nothing too much, just... hurts my eyes a bit...
john-doe
This is great! May I suggest some small improvements for scannability?

ul {line-height:1.3;} ul li {padding-left:1ch;text-indent:-1ch} ul li + li {margin-top:.2em;} a:hover, a:focus {text-decoration:revert;}

Also, using <ol> lists instead of <ul> could help too.

zie
Also see: text.npr.org and lite.cnn.com
Shank
There's also Legible News, which is similar, but aggregates news sources from Wikipedia articles instead of just pulling different site feeds: https://legiblenews.com/