Show HN: YCombinato – A domain-hacked "Hacker News" client (news.ycombinato.com)
This is a little "HN Reader" experiment I made using a domain hack of "news.ycombinato.com" <- notice the "r" is missing.
Basically, I thought it would be cool to make a "clone" of the "Hacker News" URL so you can quickly navigate to "YCombinato" from any post on "news.ycombinator" by just dropping the r in the domain. The benefit is a few extra features like; sorting, searching etc...
Unfortunately I realized it's essentially a phishing attack :( according to the browser, which means there will probably be a warning message on most browsers... but it's still usable and hopefully people find it enjoyable.
There's so many "Hacker News" clients now that it's almost equivalent to the TODO app for web developers. This project does take it pretty far by replicating the URL, so if moderators are unhappy with it, please let me know
It's a static site using the [1] algolia API, but I tried hard to make it fast and snappy. It's fully [2] open-source and hosted on github too.
Anyway, thought I'd share it, let me know what you think!
36 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadNo phishing warnings for me. Not sure if YC would be happy with it though :^)
Brave 1.59.124, Chromium 118.0.5993.117
Android 14; Build/UP1A.231005.007
what prevents me (legally) to purchase a domain, make it orange, and manually aggregate news in it?
Assuming the content is not scraped, and no icons / logos are copied, can there be legal actions followed and if so on what basis?
Domain typosquat + brand color/style imitation : IANAL, but it sounds clear cut to me.
if my browser automatically assumes missing an r in a domain name is phishing (without the domain being blacklisted somewhere) I am moving browsers.
This stuff is very common. The easiest way to find it is to locate infrastructure associated with one homology (nameservers, or IP addresses of nameservers or hosting) and then see what other domains are on those servers / hosting, assuming you have access to a crowdsourced Passive DNS database.
(Crowdsourced in this case is important, and I draw a distinction because most commercial PDNS DBs are crowdsourced, and I offer free software which synthesizes PTR records from locally observed PDNS because it serves a different purpose.)
if I as a user want something to _correct_ me, well and good. but the browser should never make those assumptions for me. it might actually work well with ISPs, but not browsers.
what about websites which actually make a _pun_ on words and are trying to be funny? switching one letter / word, etc...
not everything is serious and not everything (I think nothing, actually) should be decided by some one else. IMO.
I think having a fixed width is problematic though. For example, because of that you probably do not have enough indentation for subcomments relative to their parents.
Could be pitched as a feature beta test site.
It would be great if you could build on this, make it more accessible and get it to work for replying, voting, flagging, etc. I like how the main comments are separated as cards.
With more third party efforts like this, maybe one day YC can be shamed into making HN look better and more accessible.
I use hckrnews.com as an alternative reader, I guess no shame in having a different domain. Especially since, fundamentally, YCombinator is presumably a regulated company, who must by law care about things like confusing names (what if you get hacked and someone uses the hacked domain to spoof YCombinator the business?). Hacker News is just an appendix.
Ycombin.at
The .at TLD isn't the cheapest but it allowed me to get basqui.at.
Also, there are many alternative frontends, how does your project compare with them?
One method is look for the alt link in the comments.