HN Explorer

Show HN: hcker.news – an ergonomic, timeline-based Hacker News front page (hcker.news)

180 points by postalcoder ↗ HN
Hi folks,

I've built an alternative Hacker News front page. It is inspired by and meant to be a replacement for hckrnews.com.

I built this because HN is woefully underfeatured, but most sites that try to improve it seem to assume that the visual design is the problem. hcker.news tries to maintain HN's familiarity while adding useful enhancements.

There are three primary views:

  - Timeline View: Browse top stories by votes or comments grouped by day, week, or month (e.g., top 20 per day, top 100 per week).  
  - Aggregate View: See top stories by votes or comments over custom time ranges.  
  - Front Page View: The original HN front page, untouched.
Feed Filtering:

  - Kagi Small Web: View only stories from websites that are a part of Kagi's Small Web, which is a curated list of non-commercial blogs
  - Custom Keyword Filters: Include/exclude keywords (e.g., include "Rust," exclude "DOGE") or set a minimum score threshold.
  - No HN Algorithm: Timeline and Aggregate Views show stories usually downranked by the HN algo (e.g., flagged posts or those with too many comments).
UI:

  - Unread Flags: Quickly spot new stories or ones you haven't seen.
  - Two Layouts: Classic HN style or a compact story view inspired by hckrnews.com.
  - Multi-column & High-density Modes: Fit more content on screen.
  - Themes: Light, Dark, and Manila.
I'd love your feedback and suggestions. Cheers!

90 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] thread
thewinnie
Hey, I just saw this post from hckrnews . com and want to say that I use it everyday! Thank you its a great website!
postalcoder
Thanks! Yeah, I really like hckrnews.com and used it every day. I built this at first because I wanted a dark mode version and then I got a little carried away, lol.
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pglevy
Mobile responsiveness?
postalcoder
Are you having issues viewing this on mobile? Which browser/device?

edit: I broke something yesterday and just fixed it. Thanks for the heads up. I tried to put some thought into making it useable on mobile, hope you try it again.

gnatolf
Not a hint of adaptation to mobile (chrome/android).
postalcoder
I pushed an update. Please give it another go, sorry about that!
pglevy
Much better, thanks! I'd still like to see a more mobile-friendly comments link though. I sometimes scan those first to see if the article is worth reading.
jasonthorsness
One of the strengths of hacker news is how the core site hasn't really changed (no broken links on any story back to ~2007 as far as I can tell). This steadiness is a rare and valuable feature.

The fact that they do this yet also expose the data and access to enable a proliferation of cool alternatives views like this one is extremely user-friendly. Unfortunately, the rest of the internet seems to be going in a different direction and locking things down.

bobbiechen
hckrnews.com gets about 40% the traffic of news.ycombinator.com, in terms of referrers to my blog (digitalseams.com) - way more than I would have expected.

I can't even imagine another site with that much usage of alternative clients; maybe Reddit before their controversial API changes?

NetOpWibby
Next might be Digg. They've hired the developer of Apollo.
phatskat
Wait Digg is back and they have the Apollo dev? I left Reddit over the api mess, Apollo was the only way I liked using their service. Def gonna look into that
Breza
Glad I'm not the only one who stayed away from Reddit after the initial boycott. I used to be a regular contributor with a bunch of front page posts. Being away made me m realize how much time, effort, and stress I put into building magic internet points. Now I spend that time doing things for myself instead.
phatskat
Yep, before Apollo I’d occasionally end up on Reddit randomly, and with that app I found myself getting pretty involved in some wonderful communities. But the whole thing was the final nail for me, and now I’m here but not nearly as engrossed which is nice
abnercoimbre
I'm one of those readers from hckrnews. Also thank you for your work :)
wyclif
I'd like to see something that combined Hacker News and Lobste.rs, but without the latter's insane hatred and blocking of the Brave browser.
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coolwulf
I built a native rust based hacker news client (open source on github):

http://fastHNreader.com

And I saw this post from it :)

collinvandyck76
I'm going to check this out when I get a chance -- it would be rad if your webpage had an animated gif or video showing it working, too.
freediver
Love the inclusion of Small Web filter!
postalcoder
I forgot to write it about it in the post. Appreciate Kagi's Small Web project, I love the filter too!
_august
This is awesome! As someone who's trying to be less chronically online, but still wants to keep on top of what's new I love this.
dbacar
i find your design easier on my eyes and the content much more accessible. Congratulations.
ls-a
Since no one is able to come close to HN UI/UX for many years, I wonder if HN used a UI/UX designer. If so then shout out to that designer
rob
They nailed it out of the park with the 12px default font size still in 2025. Probably the only site I have to use my browser's zoom feature on.
ls-a
To be fair i have my zoom set to 110% for all websites not just HN
philistine
How many unthinking users just stay away from the web because the text is too small across the board?
krapp
Most people browse the web on their phone or watch, I don't think it's a problem.
consumer451
IIRC, HN is a fork of early reddit, correct?

I am curious how different the features and design were around the time of the fork.

pests
I thought Reddit was python and HN is custom written in arc?
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stevenally
This is great. Love the small web filter.

Well done! I will be using it.

postalcoder
Thanks! Feel free to email me if you have any feedback.
stevenwliao
Thank you for the keyword filter!
instagib
Yeah, I wrote my own server to pull using the api in Python but the exclusion keyword filter did not work well.
looking4job
I like that it’s inspired by hckrnews.com but it’s not installed like a pwa, it just opens as a new tab when I add it to the iOS home screen. Hckrnews behaves much more like an app without browser chrome.

Other than that I like it and will use it instead of hckrnews

postalcoder
I just added a manifest, so you should be able to install it as a pwa, but some of the styling is rough around the edges in pwa mode. I'll clean it up.
atomic128
"Random recent" browsing is the best way to read Hacker News. It's not addictive, it gives you a quick sample of what people are thinking about recently, prevents your own biases from narrowing your view, etc. For example, https://rnsaffn.com/zg2/ where each page refresh gives you a random post, plus its parent thread, plus some detail about that post's author's history.
conroydave
i like this a lot. any chance you can do the settings in as a url parameter so we can bookmark our preferred configuration?
postalcoder
I have a feature branch that's working on just that. I'll get that up soon. In the meantime, configs are stored locally so they’re saved across sessions.
nico
Very cool, thank you for sharing

One thing that I miss, that I use a lot on HN, is the hide feature. It helps me clear the clutter of stuff that I either already read or am not going to read

postalcoder
I can add that, but it'll be local – are you okay with that setting not being synced?
nico
Totally fine for it to be local. Thank you for the fast reply :)
AtroxDev
Really like your UI! Built something similar for myself (also as an replacement for hckrnews.com): https://hnhub.dev/
postalcoder
Great work with this, I like that we both thought to tackle similar things like sorting by date/score/comments within the timeline itself.
wvl
Perhaps an inspired by https://hckrnews.com would be appropriate on the site?

btw, to those who want a dark mode for hcrknews, try: https://hckrnews.com/beta/

postalcoder
There was already one in the about page but I added some verbiage more prominently up top as well.
abnercoimbre
I had no idea -- instant bookmark! Any insights as to why dark mode is in beta though?
xk_id
Sir if you could finally add keyword filters, I wouldn’t spend half a second considering an alternative. I sorely missed this the past years while HN has been spammed with AI marketing.
koito17
Noticed the site flickers when loading. Out of curiosity, I disabled JavaScript and reloaded the site. Unfortunately, the site doesn't work at all without JavaScript, whereas the official Hacker News frontend handles this use-case well.

I understand browsing without JavaScript isn't considered a valid use-case nowadays, but it would be nice if the site performed some sort of server-side data fetching. That way users don't experience flickering. As a bonus, while waiting for JavaScript to load, users can at least see headlines (but maybe not stories; that's totally fine).

postalcoder
The flicker was introduced due to a temporary banner I put in that I've since removed. Try it again, thanks for letting me know about it.
johnisgood
Probably because of the "Show" / "Hide" thing. He should just use CSS for that. You can mimick it by some CSS hack with checkboxes (that are not really checkboxes as far as the user is concerned).

You can have a modal, and multi-step CAPTCHA in CSS, so it should be relatively easy to just stick to CSS for this functionality.

adrianwaj
Seeing something like this for /bestcomments would be great too. :)

Does one exist already?

postalcoder
Wow, /bestcomments is one of those pages that I at one point knew existed but totally forgot about since.

There's no api for that (I don't think?), but I'm not averse to scraping. I suppose it'd work decently as a fourth view.

Would you want to just see it as a list of comments or also in a timeline view as well?

adrianwaj
The top comment right now on /bestcomments was from 7 days ago. It's like some comments only "arrive" onto that series of pages when they get enough votes.

I would just have a timeline of all comments that become best. It could be sorted by how new they are to any thread since being submitted to it, or, how new they are to actually becoming classified as a best comment. Former: "freshest best comments" Latter: "newest best comments"

To make it really nice, show each comment, and be able to close it from viewing and then remember the state between sessions. That way people can go through each comment and they don't have to read it twice - they've already closed it after having read it. A bit like an RSS reader. Or the person could even delete read or ignored comments. Wait maybe an alternative to all this is to provide 2 rss feeds of previous timelines: new/fresh.

!!

aryan14
Doesn’t look good on mobile, difficult to use
insane_dreamer
Great design!

How about view by #comments (besides time / #points)?

What does the colored vertical bar to the left of some posts represent?

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postalcoder
Appreciate it! You can currently view by resort by number of comments if you switch top Top Comment view but I suppose allowing you to toggle between all is a trivial add. will add that. the colored vertical bar represents unseen stories.