I made one[0] for myself that splits by day, and otherwise orders by score within day, but grouped into categories and keywords (or site). Clicking the title shows yesterday's or older stories. It started out being a single page view that I could load while commuting in the subway that had intermittent Internet on my phone, and load several story links at each stop. I've since stopped commuting of course but still use it so I'm not playing dopamine slot machine.
I still want to improve it to be able to categorize story groups lower (or suppress them) and surface niche stories that may not have made the front page but of non-mainstream interests that I (or others) may care about--perhaps with some sort of reader-driven tagging system.
Love hckr news, it has basically replaced the "front page" of Hacker News for me. So much easier to find the top/relevant/most discussed stories at a glance, particularly for last week's news!
I just saw this for the first time. It seems to address a lot of issues with hacker news that I never liked. Including the hands off / casual attittude to usability and design. Tiny fonts, fiddly links, etc. Try using it on a mobile browser. It sucks.
This is the same content but with a better and responsive design. And by that I don't just mean how it looks but the core functionality of the site. How it looks is actually pretty minimalistic and clean.
Finding stuff back on HN is tricky because the page changes all the time and the items re-order and disappear. This gets rid of that by sorting by time. And then you can narrow it down with top 10% and top 50%. So simple and effective. I loved Twitter and Facebook a lot more before they decided to be "clever" and hired a lot of machine learning propeller heads that completely ruined the experience by trying to second guess what I should be seeing and not seeing (which mostly serves their needs rather than mine).
HN of course has a much more simplistic algorithm of some formula involving time, upvotes, and number of comments. It works in combination with the old school paged list of stuff where the page size was set in stone to 30. It creates a sense of urgency for people to get their link on the front page. It's prime real-estate and it replaced slashdot in that sense.
This seems to keep the best parts of that by simply sorting by time and getting rid of the 30 items per page thing with a more modern design. You can simply scroll back as far as you want and still benefit from the "frontpage" notion by filtering.
I’d been gradually customizing it on my phone by using an inspector extension and a custom CSS extension. Recently another poster shared a more thorough stylesheet, so I switched to that. It wasn’t entirely my preference but it’s close enough that I was satisfied to stop trying to customize someone else’s website on my phone.
Well, since then one thing after another has started getting smaller and closer together again, presumably as selectors change for other purposes.
I’ve previously built a dark mode extension that I won’t link because it’s also broken now. I’d love to actually contribute mobile friendly styles that people could opt into. But as far as I can tell HN is intended to be used by people with perfect eyesight and perfect hand eye coordination with a mouse on a good desk surface and a large screen.
The ordering isn't magic, but there's still magic in its choice of what to include. It includes anything that made it to HN's front page, which is based on the magic you mention.
RSS is pretty good for this, or works for me at least. The only minor annoyance is that when a title is edited, it shows up in the feed as a new duplicate.
Custom views offers a very different perspective of what is "front page" for Hacker News, and it severely interacts with the argument of how the front page ought be curated. IMO most consumer apps and feed-like experiences should offer custom views for those who care for something other than an officially curated experience.
My HACK app provides all those (and a few additional views which aren't listed on that page) plus chronological views which can be filtered by Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly. You can also filter for posts with 100, 200, 300, 400 or 500 points.
Also sends push notifications for when someone replies/comments to your post/comment.
Isn't HN like other forums with terrible, er quaint UI at this point? No power users on reddit actually use the bare app or official mobile application.
Been using this site for ages... It's kind of the last port of call when I've read most of the homepage and I'm not yet satisfied! Well done and straight to the point.
Dear Hckr news, I'm one of those overly curious weirdoes who just has to know what every `DEAD undefined` is for, so now I have to click through on each. You used to display the headlines, and I could dismiss most of them by doing nothing. Could you put back the dead headlines?
Kudos for including post mortems in the feed at all though! Many would not.
Browsing with showdead is weirdly revealing. Most dead comments I see are inflammatory but some are just unpopular takes. Often I disagree with them too but I’m glad I see them. Most dead top level posts are dead for no apparent reason, and seem to have been dead on arrival. They often look like reasonable submissions, at least browsing shownew which I do regularly. I’d even vouch for many of them but there’s no context for why they’re DOA and I have enough disagreements with HN moderation without blindly going on a vouching spree against mysterious judgments.
No it doesn’t, or at least not always. I wasted my time last night on the stupid “junior dev thinks he’s a senior” crap post because it was on hckrnews (with points and comment counts) even though it was killed (flagged) on the real HN.
(I browse with showdead but I still have a signal that says “this may not be worth your time” before reading.)
While it's good, I somehow experience that it's harder to scan post titles than original site. It's probably numbers have the same contrast and in front of title, which makes it seems more important, thus, be distracted from scanning titles.
Finally, Hacker News gets closer to Slashdot. Now all we need is abstracts for stories, and the karma system that lets people communicate what their vote means.
You can learn about this on a post on GitHub about much (but not all) of HN's undocumented behavior [1]:
"All comments start with a score of 1 point (but in order to prevent bandwagoning, the comment score is not visible to users other than the author). After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment. Downvoted comments (i.e. with a score < 1) reduce their placement on the comment thread and will appear desaturated to other users deemphasize them."
That’s more how than why. I also want to know why people downvote things a lot of the time. I’m not perfect at always commenting productively but I really try, and it miffs me when I add something I think has value and see it downvoted without a comment explaining why. Sometimes it’s a topic under debate and I’m trying to better just accept that people are disagreeing without using their words. Sometimes though it’s a technical topic with no apparent disagreement and I share some insight about the topic, and just wonder why anyone thought “nope it’s bad you shared that knowledge”.
Sorry, perhaps I phrased that poorly. I understand that gray is a sign of negative score; I mean to say that it would be helpful to have an understanding of why a comment has been downvoted. Sometimes it's clear; some comments are rude, unhelpful, factually incorrect, etc. But sometimes it's not clear at all: Did people just disagree? Is there a factual error that I can't see? Sometimes grayed-out comments with no replies are really frustrating, because I can't see why they got downvoted. Slashdot's system is nice in that it at least makes people give a hint as to why a comment was downmodded. (I'm not saying I strongly want that system specifically, just something to provide more signal.)
This has been my portal to get to HN for several years. Clean, with an easier to browse/scan interface (compared to bare HN), easy to find the posts with most votes and comments, and filtering options (which I rarely use).
For some reason, I’ve found that I still miss some interesting posts with hckrnews. Maybe it’s because those posts have been pushed down in ranking over the hours I’m not checking or because I’m not using the available filters. So I still go to HN directly sometimes.
I was a long time user of hckrnews.com until HN implemented the `past` link above for easy access... I realized I was missing things I was interested in by just filtering by top 10 in hckrnews.com.
I made one[0] for myself that splits by day, and otherwise orders by score within day, but grouped into categories and keywords (or site). Clicking the title shows yesterday's or older stories. It started out being a single page view that I could load while commuting in the subway that had intermittent Internet on my phone, and load several story links at each stop. I've since stopped commuting of course but still use it so I'm not playing dopamine slot machine.
I still want to improve it to be able to categorize story groups lower (or suppress them) and surface niche stories that may not have made the front page but of non-mainstream interests that I (or others) may care about--perhaps with some sort of reader-driven tagging system.
[0] https://hackerer.news