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Hey HN! I'm excited to share a tool I've been working on - a native Hacker News reader built with Rust and egui. Here's a screenshot: https://github.com/haojiang99/hacker_news_reader/blob/main/s....

As a daily HN reader, I've always struggled with keeping track of interesting posts I want to read later. Browser tabs pile up, bookmarks get forgotten, and I lose track of what I've already read. I needed a way to:

1. Browse HN efficiently (across all sections - hot, new, show, ask, jobs, best) 2. Quickly mark posts as "todo" for later reading 3. Mark posts as "done" when finished 4. Filter and search effectively

I couldn't find a tool that combined all these features, so I built one. It's been tremendously helpful for my own HN reading workflow, and I thought others might find it useful too.

Features:

- *Integrated todo tracking*: Mark stories as "todo" and "done" to manage your reading progress

- *Search functionality*: Filter stories by keyword in title, domain, or author

- *Multiple sections*: Browse all HN sections (hot, new, show, ask, jobs, best)

- *Threaded comments*: View comments in a Reddit-like threaded format

- *Dark/light mode*: Easy on the eyes in any environment

- *Keyboard shortcuts*: Efficient navigation with keyboard-centric design (1-6 for tabs, Ctrl+F for search)

- *Auto-loading*: Automatically loads more content when scrolling

- *Color-coding*: Stories color-coded by score for easy scanning

- *Native app*: Fast, responsive, and works offline with local caching

Built with Rust and the egui UI framework, with SQLite for local storage. The app scrapes Hacker News HTML directly rather than using the official API to capture the full story context.

Check out the GitHub repo (https://github.com/yourusername/hacker_news_reader) for installation instructions and source code. Built and tested on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

This started as a personal tool to solve my own HN reading habits, but I hope others find it useful too. The code is MIT licensed and I'd love your feedback, feature suggestions, or contributions!

OK, why not RSS reader?

Because I can customize a lot of functions related to Hacker News which usual RSS reader cannot

Yes, this is obvious. But why don't you offer YOUR script not for a general RSS feed?

That could be another tool :p

sounds like a good idea & a lot of people who would need this

Thank you. I will work to make it available to more people and make this system more powerful and extremely fast.

Every forum system tries to replicate the user-empowering features of Usenet with slrn, and usually falls short.

Well I'm implementing a LLM based auto summary for each article and other features which focus on usability / readability / tracking for HN users. And this is more specialized and cannot be achieved by other tools.

Hrm. You should pivot to making an Electric Monk.

"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."

- Douglas Adams.

Perhaps you could teach the LLM to perform the task of enjoying the articles for you too?

Please use the thread title link

What I thought yeah. It’s LLM generated shit all the down.

Building an HN reader feels like the Hello World for hackers. Still waiting for HN in BF running in the Doom HUD.

Pretty much. That is why this was a tiny personal project I did. The key for me is to be a le to track article and comments on HN for myself. I found it useful and that's why I decided to open source and make it available for everyone else.

Cool project. I too did something similar , built a HN client app for iPhone

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/h-for-hackernews/id6744145932

The second Github link is broken

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