I love Hacker News, the problem is that, like all social platforms, it easily becomes a slot machine. Every time you look there is a new post or comment!
HackerDaily is built to alleviate this problem as well as a few others:
- The posts are grouped per day, starting from yesterday. So you never miss the best posts
- It has an improved collapsing comment system
- It’s a PWA, so you can install it to your homescreen and use it as an app
- It has a dark mode
- It's open source[1]
I would love to hear what you think about it!
To keep the site as lightweight as possible, I only use CSS to enable dakr mode. This is done by using prefers-color-scheme.[1] So you can only enable dark mode by enabling it either on your computer/phone on in your browser.
Please let me know if you've any more questions! :)
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
I find your HackerDaily comment section much more difficult to read compared to standard HN. I think it's because Hacker News indentation is larger (with upvote/downvote arrows), and standard HN uses almost the entire width of my 4K display (which makes almost every comment only 1 or 2 lines long), compared to your website which has a narrow column so wraps each comment into many paragraphs (which makes it harder to view the comment tree in a compact way).
I'm sure other users prefer the narrow column view, so take my feedback with a grain of salt.
To give a positive comment, long comments are easier to read on this version.
I just deployed a version with reduced margins between paragraphs in a comment and I'm gonna look into how to improve the comment metadata in a less obtrusive way.
I indeed designed HackerDaily explicitly with smaller columns in mind. The reason for this is that it makes reading longer comments a lot easier. There has been quite a bit of research done to figure out what the optimal line length is and most sources come down to about 60-80 characters. With 80-90 characters on HackerDaily its already on the outer edge of the readability spectrum.
There's the same trade-off with code line length. Shorter lines are easier to read, but they make understanding the overall structure of the file much more difficult.
While I haven’t used the site much, it seemed as if one could only navigate by day for the last one week. Is it possible to enter or choose a date and go to that date in the (probably distant) past? If yes, I haven’t discovered it. I don’t have time to catch up with some posts and threads within a week, and would like to use this interface if possible. I get that it may add to your storage and server costs to keep a longer term archive.
I haven't add anything to the UI for now. Do you have an idea how to add this nicely to the existing UI?
As a start, I think adding a “Choose Date” link and providing a date picker to navigate to a specific day may be nice.
I am currently looking into how to generate an RSS feed. I personally don't use RSS, so I am not sure how you would like to have it be implemented, I have two questions:
1. Do you want all articles on HackerDaily added to your RSS feed? (HackerDaily only shows the articles with 100+ points, so that's about 30-50 articles per day)
2. HackerDaily uses your local timezone to find the articles per day, would you like to have this for the RSS feed as well, or is based on UTC also okay?
I also made an attempt (with far less style) to reduce my dopamine driven visits by showing top stories only for today so the second visit looks almost identical to the first with 'not much new' to see, then move on. Popular keywords are grouped at the bottom to help surface the rare interesting cuts.
2. I think separate RSS feeds for different timezones might be better (not _every_ timezone, but say, every whole hour offset), so everyone can choose what they want; either based on the timezone or on their daily routine.
I also created it to use (in my opinion) a better UI and UX, to add a dark mode, and to make it a PWA.
I know it increases the content and thus the slot-machine surface area, but Show/Ask represent a good portion of my desire to come HN at all. There are many super interesting posts that never make it to the front page.
Another way to think about it is i often want to see discussions and projects from HN folks. The frontpage can often just be full of popular nonsense - Reddit-esque. However ShowHN and AskHN often have gems that are obscure, with a much smaller amount of points.
Yet another way to look at it is: i'd love a toggle filter to only show me AskHN/ShowHN on the front page. However most days it would only be one or two posts.
Hopefully this illustrates my desires :)
(one final example, hah, might be this very post. I suspect it'll get over 100, but currently it's sitting at 60 pts)
Receiving the updates via email helps to throttle back the urge to hit the front page every now and then.
Anyway, nice design!
I quickly added a page with a darker background[1], is this more readable? If not I might need to increase the spacing between the items.
The problem i've been struggling with is how i properly summarize. The slot behavior is useful because slot-wins have material impact of finding content i do, actually, want to consume. Reducing the slot-pulls to once a day puts more weight on something else doing the filtering. Meaning i fear missing things i care about.
I wonder if there's some type of non-ML pattern seeking implementation that will let you refine your filter to improve signal:noise. I say non-ML because i'm interested in non-trained, smaller locally hosted datasets.
Anyway, i digress. This is cool! I think i'll let this thing be my slot-machine for the next few days and see if i feel like i'm missing anything. Appreciate it!
Most posts with 100+ points are at least somewhat interesting and I only have to do the manual filtering to find the few posts I want to read once a day.
edit: Just noticed the incredibly nifty comment collapsing buttons. Very intuitive.
Small Feedback: The "Show HN" tag does stand out a lot - giving it the vibe of something like a site administration announcement or an error message. Maybe you could consider toning it down a bit?
Otherwise, great work. Let's see if I can replace normal HN :)
Really nice work.
I would only add that the comments are way too big to be usable. I’d take a look at the Octal IOS app for an example of doing hacker news comments “right” in terms of size and display.
Nice color scheme!
