HN Explorer

85 comments

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JimmaDaRustla
That awkward moment when you're already on hckrnews.com...
ocfx
Well I'm not when I'm leaving this comment!
JimmaDaRustla
True. But if you get the browser plugins, its there in spirit!
jchung
Ah. That's why I was so confused when the page just.... refreshed.
molecule
I've been using this for awhile now as my primary HN front-page interface, for several reasons:

- easier to read

- mobile-browser friendly

- auto refreshes

- preserves articles that make it to the front page, and in (reverse) order of the time they made it to the front page, so no need to constantly check the front page and parse all of its contents to see if new articles are posted

cf. http://www.hckrnews.com/about.html

a big Thank You and kudos to its author(s) and maintainer(s)-- it works well and consistently!

eball
Funny how it still shows the link to the below story that got buried by the flamewar detector.

"I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612854

andrewcooke
that's a feature. with hckrnews you get to see all the articles, even if they were only on the front page for a short time. for me, that's the biggest advantage it has over the main site.
pbbakkum
I've been using this for about a year, really good interface
pwnna
I still like http://hn.premii.com
jsogarro
Yeah. I like this one a lot as well. Use it on my phone, iPad and in browser.
aCCelerate
Yes, this gets my vote hands down. hckrnews looks fine but hn.premii gets mobile right. I use it on my mobile and on my desktop all the time. Only downside is that you can't write comments.
laumars
oh wow that is good.

I don't mind the classic HN layout - in fact I kind of like it because it's clean way to present information. And all the other designs of HN have added nothing but a reskin. Where as that one actually contributes a original (to HN) ideas itself.

cliveowen
This is really something, thanks for the link.
gbrhaz
How do some sites (like this one) get more accurate and up-to-date data than others (one in OP)?
christiangenco
Huh. This would be alright on an iPad, but it doesn't fit my current flow of browsing HN:

* skim a page of links

* open ~5 interesting links in new tab, open comments if I predict the comments will be interesting

* go through tabs, which are already loaded by the time I get there

With this strategy, there's not a millisecond of perceived loading time.

abrowne
I have the same workflow, and I like http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/ on mobile (and sometimes desktop).
tnorthcutt
I wish this one looked the same on iOS 7 as it does on e.g. Chrome desktop. Instead it's doing some sort of app-like thing to retain iOS 6 styling, and the address bar and bottom toolbar never disappear, so the available screen real estate is very limited. At least it makes comments readable, though.
abrowne
I don't have an iOS device anymore, and I never used that site when I did, so I forgot it did the fake-iOS thing. I definitely prefer the non-iOS theme. It looks and works great on FxOS.
taude
Funny, this is almost exactly what I do, though I almost always open both the articles & discussion on articles that catch my eye.
Killswitch
I was using it and it's great but the biggest annoyance is the fact that if I wanted to comment, I still had to go to the original HN... So I started using this extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/helvetinews/jebgog...

Now I just use regular HN with it.

jon-wood
Wow, just installed it, and Hacker News no longer makes my eyes bleed! Thanks for pointing it out.
city41
There have been many alt HN interfaces. I try them all, yet I never end up sticking with any of them. I feel like HN meets its needs pretty well and I like that they have resisted change (whether consciously or not)
orbitur
I think the happy medium is one of the browser extensions. I'm using "Hacker New" for Chrome, and it adds basic nice things like default larger text, comment collapsing. Of course, I get used to it and become annoyed if I decide to visit the unmodified HN on my mobile device.
taude
I installed Hacker New a long time ago and I forgot I was even using it until I went to Hacker News from a different browser
zero-g
I have started using it few months ago and I like it. Mostly because I can read hacker news as pragmatically as I have been reading google reader. I don't need to visit home of HN several times a day to find out if there is any new posts. I just open hckrnews.com and I see what have been posted since my last visit.
Pent
This is the only way I use hacker news.
kbenson
I used to use this interface, but then I noticed a bug (or interesting feature, depending on your point of view) in that when you were viewing the top 10 or top 20, and loaded more articles, some articles would disappear from the list.

My theory on this is that it was caused by loading articles a certain number of hours back from the current time, and then grouping by day before sorting to the top X.

For example, if the last 24 hours were loaded, and grouped into today and (part of) yesterday, you would get an accurate top X for today so far, and an accurate top X for the portion of the previous day it had fetched.

This was particularly noticeable when I hadn't visited for a few days (I've since rectified this aberrant behavior of mine) and loaded a few past days to review missed submissions. Seeing something that caught my eye disappear as it loaded older content drove me nuts.

It looks like the problem is fixed now, but it's hard to be sure, as it may be more or less likely depending on the time of the day you visit.

I sent a bug report to the developer when I noticed this (in February 2013), but never heard back. I'll happily go back to using this interface if it's fixed though, I found it generally more pleasant to use.

wvl
Sorry if I never got back to you about this.

There were definitely some bugs around the filtering / content loading. I _think_ they've been resolved for a while now, so I hope you'll give it another shot.

kbenson
No problem. I definitely will, because I'm enough of a completist in general that it bothers me when feel I've missed something that looks interesting, and I'm already seeing that again. Well done, you've created something that immediately triggers (because I can see what I was missing) and alleviates (because I can check what I missed) my obsessive behavior over HN. Next step, profit as I throw money at you... ;)
kbenson
Oh, and if you're looking for recommendations on new features:

1. Colorize submissions that have had X% increase in votes/comments (with different colors) since last visit when in top X mode (specifically in the past 48-72 hours). 2. Allow a user defined point/comment threshold over which submissions are colorized.

moskie
I've been pretty happy with the HackerNew Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...
nijiko
Can't upvote this enough.
cbaleanu
Using this for over 6 months, can't go back to regular HN, even though this means browsing using Chrome.
ISL
Depending upon your objections about Chrome, you can use a non-Google Chromium binary.
cliveowen
I've always used this, since day one.
triplesec
I welcome this, but the UI confuses immediately: what's top 10 and top 20? and top 50%? No obvious explanations as to what the referent of "top" is! No scales, no FAQ.

Also, I want to know what the settings are compared with the "official" HN frontpage ordering.

"about" is broken, where I had hoped to find a FAQ

wvl
You can try /about again. Server was having problems there with the load.

FYI top 10 / top 20 / top 50% should be the "Top N" stories by number of points for each day according to your timezone.

eono
Seems like the server was not expecting that load...
usablebytes
Excellent move! Cheers! Can we also look at those Arials at the top?
bluecalm
One thing I would love is:

-top X posts by comments from a day/week/month

-top X posts by votes from day/week/momth

What I don't like about Hacker News is that interesting things fall out of front page too quickly and discussion dies I prefer interface where interesting stuff stays at the top longer (amount of comments last week approximate it well in my view).

hgezim
You should take a look at http://www.hndigest.com . You can subscribe to get emails at specified intervals (daily all the way to weekly) and choose from top 5-30 stories per email.
paborden
Like this. But can you please kill the hellobar?
mzs
It would be nice to collapse or skip all replies to a parent, do any of these extensions do that? I often find some discussion that is uninteresting to me (but might be others for others) and just want to easily get past it. If it is long, it takes some time to find where the indention matches-up many PGDNs below.
aluhut
I wish there would be a dark/black edition somewhere.
seabrookmx
Me too. Exactly the same layout as http://www.hckrnews.com/ but with white text on a dark grey background.

The orange components could be left the same, as they would still provide good contrast and go with the colour scheme.