Timbo’s Hacker News Reader (THNR) serves up hot’n’fresh Hacker News content
using HN’s API. THNR is in beta.
My goals with this project are:
- help HN readers find stories of interest or value to them more quickly and consistently
- help HN readers identify and bypass stories they’re not interested in
- provide a pleasant story-browsing experience
- ensure that the THNR interface works quickly, intuitively, and reliably
To that end, THNR’s key features include:
- surface the account name/channel name for links to GitHub, Medium, Reddit, Substack, Twitter, and YouTube (with more platforms on the way)
- surface the programming-language percentages for a project’s source code on GitHub
- show a nicely cropped .webp thumbnail of the og:image in linked content
- show a thumbnail of the first page of linked PDFs (with a dogeared corner to quickly signal it’s a PDF)
- show Ⓣ Ⓝ Ⓑ Ⓐ Ⓒ badges next to stories that also appear in
topstories.json (a.k.a. /news),
newstories.json (a.k.a. /newest),
/best,
/active, and
/classic
- abstain from JavaScript for now, and commit to safeguarding a quality experience for visitors who browse with JS disabled (Note: some future THNR features may need JS, but they’ll be optional)
- abstain from invasive user tracking (à la Google Analytics and similar)
Ideas for future features include:
- feeds for ask, show, jobs, and polls stories
- links to past HN submissions of the same link in case you want to read the HN comments when the same article appeared before
- recommender for HN stories with similar content as the current story
- recommender for HN stories with the same commenters as the current story
Questions? Suggestions? Complaints? Send it all to me at tim@texastim.dev.
This project is on GitHub! timoteostewart/timbos-hn-reader. Feel free to fork, or add a bug report or feature request for me to work on.
If you like what I’m doing and would be so kind as to elevate my caffeine levels
while I develop features and squash bugs,
send me a frothy cappuccino!
Disclaimer: I’m not employed by HN, YC, or a YC-backed company.