Is anyone interested in a better Hacker News? I really like the content on this forum but I find the features and UI lacking. I was going to make another website dedicated to tech news and discussion but with a better user exp. Would anyone be interested in trying the product when I finish it? |
Who cares about UI
P.s., to OP, you can roll your own UI on top of HN without losing whatever this community is.
The whole twitter thing around the bots was just a theatre.
Then there's the problem of remembering the story's title so one can search for it. Say, several days later I want to revisit a story that I remember the substance of but I have forgotten its title then sometimes it's almost impossible for me to find it again (stories often have short or cryptic titles that have little bearing with their content).
There's also a similar problem with comments, if I want to revisit a comment I read several days earlier, it's often almost impossible to find—unless I've noted the handle of the poster.
Another annoyance are stories behind firewalls, the poster will have access but many of us will not. It would make sense for these stories to be flagged with a big red dot or such so we can bypass them.
There is a button below every post labelled ‘favourite’, once you’ve marked a post as favourite you can access the list of such bookmarked posts under your profile settings called favourited posts
Here’s a link to your one : https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=hilbert42
> Then there's the problem of remembering the story's title so one can search for it. > There's also a similar problem with comments.
There’s tool at https://hn.algolia.com to help you search for posts via both title and comments
> There's also a similar problem with comments, if I want to revisit a comment I read several days earlier, it's often almost impossible to find—unless I've noted the handle of the poster.
You can quickly search for all comments on hn.algolia.com
Its a YC 2014 batch company.
Right, but that presupposes I want to remember or mark it at the time when I first read it which is usually not the case.
It's chronological.
A quick tip though which helped me: you can favorite posts and comments. You need to open each to see the favorite link.
1. Dark mode
2. Two-factor authentication for better account security
Apart from that (and maybe a better API to help with third-party apps), HN is perfect. The minimal (should I say retro?) UI just adds to the charm of the site. Consider it repellent for those who aren't ready for the HN atmosphere.
Ublock Origin filters are great workaround
https://rich.sh/2024/03/20/hn-theme
just update a few lines:
# Text
news.ycombinator.com##.c00:style(color: #fafafa !important)
# Inputs
news.ycombinator.com##input[type="text"], input[type="url"], textarea :style(background-color: inherit; border: 1px solid #d4d4d4; color: #000000 !important)
After almost fifteen years of skimming once a day or two through the comments on the topics that interest me most, I am still amazed by the wide of range of old-and-new school engineers of all trade who share their experience and opinions. This is invaluable and does not necessarily need any fancy UI.
How about instead creating a WebExtension for HackerNews (similar to RES for Reddit) which would add / change things you miss.
Since people are mentioning their gripes: Mine is titles are black but once clicked they become the same grey color as the line below each post title, which is also a link for the commments, the point count etc. So if you click on a title, read, then press back it becomes hard to distinquish or find a previously clicked link esp when the order of post changes.
In short, visited title links should be a different color
Maybe an alternative might be an imageboard instead.
Currently I am exploring the data and try to identify named entities from the titles. You can have a look here: http://news.facts.dev/
As for the “UI lacking”, I have added some minimal custom styling catering to my personal preference - some subtle smooth corners, paddings/spacings, author highlights, width constraint, etc. Even that, I’m tempted to nick it and get used to whatever it is.
Not the best nor optimized but here are the styles
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/tdkzn5zhm218lvggl91l5/browser...
Why not join YC instead and push through on UI changes? HN fails badly on accessibility (small fonts, small buttons, very close to each other, etc). Or just wait for the people working on HN to get older so they encounter the real issues firsthand and decide to make some changes?
If you compare old.reddit.com to www.reddit.com you'll see what I mean. Reddit used to look and behave a lot like HN, and that is what made it a prime source of information. Currently, it surives off it's userbase but it is no longer a good primary source of information because unit time vs unit information is quite poor now.
Now you need to have a better UI than both places and get the interest of people who are not satisfied with all of HN, lobsters and Reddit. It's going to be a really hard thing to achieve.
Dark mode is a feature request, but these days Dark Reader makes it possible on most browsers, HyperWeb for Safari on iOS can do it for iPhone users
(https://hackerwebapp.com + https://hckrnews.com + several small custom features)
(That seems to be the first date data is available for)
Every entry on hckrnews has hit the homepage, so 'all' is exactly that. The current homepage filter is simply a filter to show what is presently on the homepage of news.ycombinator.com.
But this is not the first time someone has been confused about the homepage filter, so I could probably explain that better somehow.
Never used any of the other filters. Maybe that’s why.
All does everything I want.
