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

180•postalcoder•8mo ago

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!

Comments

thewinnie•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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.

ganisgan•8mo ago

So cool! Thanks for this!

postalcoder•8mo ago

Thank you!

pglevy•8mo ago

Mobile responsiveness?

postalcoder•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

Not a hint of adaptation to mobile (chrome/android).

postalcoder•8mo ago

I pushed an update. Please give it another go, sorry about that!

pglevy•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

Next might be Digg. They've hired the developer of Apollo.

phatskat•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

I'm one of those readers from hckrnews. Also thank you for your work :)

wyclif•8mo ago

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.

coolwulf•8mo ago

I built a native rust based hacker news client (open source on github):

http://fastHNreader.com

And I saw this post from it :)

collinvandyck76•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

Love the inclusion of Small Web filter!

postalcoder•8mo ago

I forgot to write it about it in the post. Appreciate Kagi's Small Web project, I love the filter too!

_august•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

i find your design easier on my eyes and the content much more accessible. Congratulations.

postalcoder•8mo ago

I'm glad to hear it!

ls-a•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

To be fair i have my zoom set to 110% for all websites not just HN

philistine•8mo ago

How many unthinking users just stay away from the web because the text is too small across the board?

krapp•8mo ago

Most people browse the web on their phone or watch, I don't think it's a problem.

consumer451•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

I thought Reddit was python and HN is custom written in arc?

consumer451•8mo ago

> Over at reddit.com, we rewrote the site from Lisp to Python in the past week.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit (2005)

That's a fun read. Hats off for Aaron.

NetOpWibby•8mo ago

Never met the guy but I miss him

consumer451•8mo ago

Hey, the website in your bio is indeed cool.

Usually not a fan of abnormal scrolling, but that's a good time.

_hcuq•8mo ago

This is great. Love the small web filter.

Well done! I will be using it.

postalcoder•8mo ago

Thanks! Feel free to email me if you have any feedback.

stevenwliao•8mo ago

Thank you for the keyword filter!

instagib•8mo ago

Yeah, I wrote my own server to pull using the api in Python but the exclusion keyword filter did not work well.

postalcoder•8mo ago

thank you too!

looking4job•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

"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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

I can add that, but it'll be local – are you okay with that setting not being synced?

nico•8mo ago

Totally fine for it to be local. Thank you for the fast reply :)

AtroxDev•8mo ago

Really like your UI! Built something similar for myself (also as an replacement for hckrnews.com): https://hnhub.dev/

postalcoder•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

There was already one in the about page but I added some verbiage more prominently up top as well.

abnercoimbre•8mo ago

I had no idea -- instant bookmark! Any insights as to why dark mode is in beta though?

xk_id•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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

Does one exist already?

postalcoder•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

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•8mo ago

Doesn’t look good on mobile, difficult to use

postalcoder•8mo ago

can you share your os/browser?

insane_dreamer•8mo ago

Great design!

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

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

postalcoder•8mo ago

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.

tonymet•8mo ago

too big

postalcoder•8mo ago

Which parts of the UI? And on mobile or in general?

tonymet•8mo ago

HN sets a high standard at 50kb so I’m snobby about anything much bigger . I think yours was 400kb compressed and a couple megs uncompressed

tonymet•8mo ago

Also the first usable paint is slow

emmanueloga_•8mo ago

I like it! Suggestions:

* Clarify relationship with https://hckrnews.com/

* Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params. That has a lot of usability improvements including being able to share the state, bookmark it, and heads up the current state. Use Rison [1] for the URL params to make it nice to read.

* The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence.

1: https://github.com/kou64yama/rison2?tab=readme-ov-file

postalcoder•8mo ago

> Clarify relationship with https://hckrnews.com/

clarified in the about page.

> Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params

Working on this

> The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence.

Makes sense i'll give it a shot.

Thanks for the suggestions, open to more if you think of any!

feep•8mo ago

Very nice. Thanks.

Any plans for rss?

I currently use https://hnrss.github.io/ (another great project), but the additional filters (once they are available as params) would be nice for rss.

As long as I am here, thanks to whoever is responsible for https://hckrnews.com, too.

adrianwaj•8mo ago

I made a site called Hackerbrain a while back. #13 here: https://hackerbits.com/hacker-news/improve-hacker-news-ui/

One of the best things about it (as mentioned in article) is the ability to see the top comment on any item very quickly.

Try it here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180804173424/http://hackerbra....

Press "top" on any item. Also try the number on each.

Note how the comments can toggle open/shut and the colors.

I would definitely use that feature. :)

Also note the byline indents, curved boxes, spacing and popups on each single comment link.

arvinsim•8mo ago

I appreciate the option to use dark mode and customize the font size.

It's just jarring though to switch the actual Hacker News comment section from the site.

Brajeshwar•8mo ago

There is an "Awesome Hacker News" at https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news

Perhaps, you should send a pull request to add this.

bosky101•8mo ago

Would have been good if the familiar navbar would have been retained. Btw /show gave 404. Trivial to support those urls. The filters were too tough to find.

auraham•8mo ago

Great design! What did you use for the drawer in the mobile version? I love it!

pravosleva•8mo ago

Need to have ability to read comments tree. Check out my exp: https://pravosleva.pro/dist.hacker-news-2024/#/news/44075353

dan_voronov•8mo ago

Thank you very much, it looks very cool. Personally, I miss the *hotkeys* because it's not very convenient to constantly click "show" on the automatically collapsing settings block.

gloosx•8mo ago

>>static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/vcd15cbe7772f49c399c6a5babf22c1241717689176015

Why?

EdA1•8mo ago

So they can see analytics

gloosx•8mo ago

The original HN doesn't have any. Why would they want to analyse the traffic on this alternative one? Ego?

insane_dreamer•8mo ago

Just tried it on mobile—works very nicely. One thing you could consider would be the ability to upvote a post from the hcker news page (ie you click on a link and read the post and then you come back to hcker page (close other tab) and want to upvote it but don’t necessarily want to go to the commments page. You’d have to be logged in to HN already, I presume. Not sure if this is even possible, just mentioning FWIW

gaws•8mo ago

Why? RSS exists, and it's lightning fast.

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Comments