HN Explorer

Show HN: Hacker Herald – like HN but with crowdsourced pics and subtitles (hackerherald.com)

251 points by MarkMc ↗ HN
Hi folks this is a project I worked on with some of my students when I was running an online JS programming course. Although the online course is no more, I finally got around to releasing Hacker Herald with a former instructor and student - thanks Arnav and Archis!

To those wondering if there is a need for such a Hacker News front end, I would just point out that most newspaper websites are laid out like this - clearly some people like this kind of layout!

Also for some stories a picture really does help - currently there is a HN story titled, "Portland airport grows with expansive mass timber roof canopy". But IMO it's better to actually see a picture of the timber roof while scrolling rather than having to click through to the article.

87 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] thread
lukasfoisy
I suspect many folks here enjoy the minimalist Hacker News UI but I, for one, really enjoy what you've put together. It somehow makes me more interested in checking out stories/posts I might have otherwise skipped on the normal UI. I'll give this a spin day-to-day.

What are your plans for this project?

voodooEntity
As someone from the "minimalist prefered" guys, im just curious - what articles sparked your interested through this layout and why would you have skipped them on the normal layout?

(inb4 i think the herald is a very well done thing i just cant think of a reason why an article there is more interresting than on the normal layout)

lukasfoisy
From today: "Portland Airport Grows With Expansive Mass Timber Roof Canopy" is a good example. I wouldn't have opened this story on Hacker News, but the image displayed on Hacker Herald had me open it.
alt227
That is an extremely impressive roof, and I agree that the title isnt grabbing. I too clicked on the picture but had previously skipped the article on HN.
voodooEntity
sorry for my late response. Thanks for giving me this example. I can kinda see why you would not click it in first place.

As for me - i have very limited time i spend on reading articles listed on hackernews so i always have to condense it down to those im very interested in.

MarkMc
Thanks! No fixed plans for future development - it kind of depends on how much traction it gets. If it gets a lot of interest I might add a 'AI editor' that chooses images and write subtitles (or deletes boring ones which have been written by the article's author). But even if it gets little use besides myself, hosting costs are minimal so it will be around for a while :)
mr_mitm
My first reaction was: this is super cool. I can't say whether I'll stick to it as I often read HN via newsboat and https://hnrss.org/frontpage, but I'll give it a try! Thanks for sharing!
eigilsagafos
A love that HN doesn’t have pics and that they strive for short meaningful titles, so I’ll stay here :)
iLoveOncall
I agree about the no pics, but come on, HackerNews has extremely cryptic titles more often than not.

Half of the frontpage is always made of titles that are either referencing ultra-niche products, clickbaity, misrepresent the content of the article, try to be smart, etc.

If anything, HackerNews would be BETTER if it did not have post titles but only excerpts.

dang
There shouldn't be titles that are either clickbaity or misrepresent the article. The site guidelines call for rewriting those ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.") and we're pretty active in doing so.
iLoveOncall
But I think this is not enough. Not misrepresenting is not enough, they should instead represent the content of the article.

If I take a random one on the front page right now, "The square roots of all evil", it doesn't describe at all its content. Yet if I flagged it, I know it wouldn't be renamed.

Another example is an earlier post that got a lot of traction: "The correct amount of ads is zero". This is borderline misrepresentative to be fair, but even being lenient on that aspect, it is not at all helping me understand what I will be reading if I decide to click on this article.

Those articles thrives on HN because even if it's not exactly clickbaity, the titles have a "shock factor" that makes people click on them.

dang
Yes, I hear you—you want titles to be more than neither-linkbait-nor-misleading, and you're right that we mostly don't go further than that on HN.

I also agree that the two titles you quoted are borderline baity and both of them are the sort that we could well do an edit on, though we didn't in those cases.

redm
The saying, “If it ain't broke, don’t fix it,” comes to mind. I’m all for progress, but Hacker News's simplicity and density are its major features.
mouse_
IMO it's not fixing something, it's offering an alternative perspective.
PeterHolzwarth
Very true of course, but I find that at this point, I use https://hckrnews.com/ as much as I use vanilla HN now, at this point, as often I want this a bit fresher and raw. Of course, hckrnew also uses the same minimalist front end style of vanilla hackernews, so I'm sure that contributes.
mertysn
^ hckrnews.com replaced vanilla HN for me years ago: you never miss popular articles if you don't visit the site for a while, and you can change the filtering to include more results if you have more time to browse. It's been wonderful for my browsing habits.
lastdong
Dark theme option comes to mind.
Cthulhu_
One tip, it might be an idea to create permalinks, so that people can open up the page at any specific date instead of just the past week. I don't know if that's feasible though, is the data for each page generated statically or kept updated?
mrbluecoat
Adding search would be a nice value-add
jasfi
The pics help to disambiguate some of the titles, but its nowhere near as lean as HN.
JKCalhoun
I like it. I think you need some kind of ... mascot. Like a town crier with a smart phone up by the banner.

Is this one scenario where perhaps you should reverse the order of the "tabs" along the top? Like put "Today" on the far right with "Yesterday", etc. following from right to left?

Or honestly ditch them altogether — adding "Yesterday" is more than enough. Who wants to go back several days to read old news?

croisillon
i would suggest to add unpaywalled links where relevant
supriyo-biswas
I'm not sure of some of the feedback being given here - the magazine layout seems to get me focused on stories that are interesting but that wouldn't have caught my attention otherwise.
voodooEntity
While i have to admit, from all the alternative frontends i have seen over the years (and there have been alot) this is by far the best.

Tho as many others mention, one of the great things on hackernews is the minimalism / simplicity - and i have to admit its one of the reasons why i always like to go on hackersnews. Just a simple textlist, easy to read, no visual clutter.

Tho for people that like a more colorfull/stylish layout this might be a good alternative

cloverich
For me, I think the lack of more generalized appeal of the interface is a net benefit, because it limits its appeal to only those that are most interested in the content. When it becomes too nice, and the audience too large, it will probably lose the thing that most of us are here (as opposed to reddit) for.

So even though I really like (and will bookmark!) this new interface design, I hope HN proper never changes.

amelius
It is ironic that the people responsible for most of the UX cruft on the internet (i.e., us programmers) prefer such minimalism in their interfaces.
dbtc
The dealer knows best what the drug will do.
thorncorona
i think most designers think hn is ugly lol
written-beyond
I like the minimal interface, gives an old.reddit.com vibe. HN is horrible to use on mobile though. Everything is tiny, difficult to tap I miss tap every 3 taps
IOT_Apprentice
Try using octal as a hacker news client. I recommend it
swyx
> Something went wrong Please try again.

did we hug it to death?

Sn0wCoder
Same issue need to turn off VPN / AdBlock....
password4321
Thanks for being willing to stick your neck out by putting your own spin on things!

I'm always interested to hear more about the sustainability of alternative HN frontends... the initial time investment, ongoing hosting costs, etc.

Maybe it'd be worth doing the research to find out what the probability is of lasting longer than the domain renewal year, especially for those such as this offering the chance for users to invest additional value.

phendrenad2
In retrospect, I should have expected the goatse as soon as I clicked to vote on images.
shahzaibmushtaq
Thumbs up for the effort, I prefer the default HN outlook.
redeux
Personally, I don’t care for the images on the articles. I find them distracting from the information I actually want, the headline and content. It seems that their purpose is purely aesthetic in this UI, but not a pleasing one for me.
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Retr0id
I notice you're hotlinking the images from their respective sources.

This isn't ideal from a privacy PoV, because you're basically announcing your presence to tens of different orgs even if you don't click on anything.

And, some hosts might not appreciate their images being hotlinked - the big sites probably don't care or even notice, but someone's personal blog without a media CDN might end up getting hammered with traffic.

rfl890
If you're posting content on HN, you should always expect a traffic increase anyways. And Cloudflare CDN is free anyways (unless you don't want to use it for political reasons, your choice)... Although I understand hotlinking is frowned-upon in a general context
wmeredith
I had the same thought. Hot linking images has been bad form since like 2004, if not earlier.
ipaddr
Copying images is a copyright issue.
more_corn
Is it?
Retr0id
It isn't.
ipaddr
Until you get a dmca notice. Taking other people's photos without permission violates copyright.
Retr0id
No, using them without permission (potentially) violates copyright. Copyright does not concern itself with the specifics of the mechanism by which the rights-holder's content enters your user's web browser, so long as you're not circumventing DRM.
sjf
The site is neat, but the airport article is really the only one that benefits from an image though. It'd be nice to not have to scroll past logos, stock images, etc.
MarkMc
The presence or absence of an image depends on user votes. If you feel an image is not useful, click the '...' button and select 'Suggest or Choose an Image' > 'This story does not need an image'
rkagerer
Is there a way I can raise the threshold?

Not every story is deserving of a photo, and if their presence felt more curated it might significantly improve my experience on your site.

badcppdev
I like how this looks but I have a feature suggestion....

Could you crowd-source categories/tags for the stories and then try and implement an opt-in / opt-out function that lets us exclude certain categories. I'm not even sure if it's possible but you're some of the way there.

MarkMc
Thanks that's a good idea! I think I'd need to use AI to categorise each story, then maybe have different tabs on the page for each category...
jack_riminton
Maybe have an option to view the main page as a list (ie copies Hacker News) but then each individual page has the photos?
tunnuz
I love it, I wonder if LLMs couldn't be used to generate some pictures.
Sn0wCoder
Think you are being downvoted because technically an LLM stands for Large Language Models, while image generation is something like LDM latent diffusion models or most people just say Stable Diffusion. If you would have said the more generic ChatGPT then the answer would have been maybe since its supposed to be Multi-Modal. If you are asking if Stable Diffusion could generate pictures based of the article description the answer is most likely yes given the prompt correctly parses the context correctly (maybe using an LLM for getting the prompt before feeding into the next tool).

I hear almost everyone call everything ChatGPT no matter what they are using (MS, Google Gemini, Ollama, etc…) ChatGPT made me a PP, ChatGPT made this image, so maybe if you want a general term ChatGPT would be more correct. I typically say ChatGPT for LLMs and Stable Diffusion when talking to normal people since most are familiar with the big two. Predicting the next pixel to draw is sorta like predicting the next word (token) I guess

Most people know what you mean, but still good to use the correct term. Disclaimer so I do not get downvoted with you: Please do your own research as I just wrote how I understand these concepts and am not an expert.

satvikpendem
It's funny because LLMs are now also using diffusion.
PaulHoule
One of the best HN redesigns I've seen in that it's not just "add whitespace" but is a totally different layout.

My take on social media is that you have to have an image in a post if you want people to engage with it.

sourcepluck
You're writing that on a medium which is social which gets tons of engagement which doesn't have any images.

I don't get it. Surely every single thread that got even modest engagement on HN since the beginning of the place disproves your take?

PaulHoule
HN is unusual because it is that way. There's nothing wrong with that.

But let's put it this way. If I find a popular article on a ScienceX site I often find it links to a journal article which may or may not be open access, let's assume that it is.

Posting to HN I will usually post the open access article.

Posting to Mastodon or Bluesky I will usually post the ScienceX link because those platforms can find an image in those articles but can't find an image in a paper in Nature. (Note on those platforms I get replies like "this is over my head" when I post a real paper whereas nobody in HN wants to admit that vulnerability)

If somebody makes an HN clone which merges in images, those images are going to have a big impact on people's engagement with that clone.