One of my biggest gripes against HN's front page is that there's so little context to go on --- just an <= 80 character headline, often not especially informative.

My own news-page rewrite includes several paragraphs of lede context, which is probably a bit on the overkill side. But a hundred characters or so should help.

I'm also wrestling with the sort-order aspect. Current cut is time-ordered within sections (another thing I wish HN had), but I'm going to be extending the article count in the next iteration.

That said, your design is clean and light, I like it.

Thanks! Great to hear it.

  > My own news-page rewrite includes several paragraphs of lede context, which is probably a bit on the overkill side. But a hundred characters or so should help.

Stay tuned, I've been thinking about the right way to do something like this too.

  > I'm also wrestling with the sort-order aspect. Current cut is time-ordered within sections (another thing I wish HN had), but I'm going to be extending the article count in the next iteration.

Hope you don't mind if I email you later for new feature feedback.

  > That said, your design is clean and light, I like it.

Thank you.

A key problem with extracting article context is that there are so many distinct sources.

That said, power laws and Zipf functions apply, and a large fraction of HN front-page articles come from a relatively small set of domains. There's further aggregation possible when underlying publishing engines can be identified, e.g., Wordpress, CMSes used by a large number of news organisations, Medium, Substack, Github, Gitlab, Fediverse servers, and a number of static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican, Gatsby, etc.).

I suspect you're aware of most of this.

I have a set of front-page sites from an earlier scraping project:

(For the life of me I cannot remember what the 3rd column represents, though it may be a miscalculated cumulative percentage. The "category" field was manually supplied by me, every site with > 17 appearances has one, as well as several below that threshold which could be identified by other means, e.g., regexes on blogging engines, GitHub pages, etc.)

  Rank  Count    ???  Site :::: Category
  ------------------------------------------------------------- 
     1  7294   5.175  n/a :::: n/a
     2  3803   7.873  nytimes.com :::: general news
     3  3495  10.352  techcrunch.com :::: tech news
     4  1580  11.473  arstechnica.com :::: tech news
     5  1344  12.426  bloomberg.com :::: business news
     6  1288  13.340  wired.com :::: tech news
     7  1171  14.171  wsj.com :::: business news
     8  1099  14.951  youtube.com :::: video
     9  1026  15.678  wikipedia.org :::: general info (wiki)
    10   921  16.332  bbc.com :::: general news
    11   911  16.978  bbc.co.uk :::: general news
    12   893  17.612  theguardian.com :::: general news
    13   866  18.226  washingtonpost.com :::: general news
    14   846  18.826  reuters.com :::: general news
    15   829  19.414  economist.com :::: business news
    16   781  19.968  theatlantic.com :::: general interest
    17   631  20.416  arxiv.org :::: academic / science
    18   628  20.862  npr.org :::: general news
    19   622  21.303  nature.com :::: academic / science
    20   614  21.738  newyorker.com :::: general interest
    21   505  22.097  eff.org :::: law
    22   475  22.434  stanford.edu :::: academic / science
    23   471  22.768  ieee.org :::: technology
    24   456  23.091  reddit.com :::: general discussion
    25   448  23.409  amazon.com :::: corporate comm.
    26   445  23.725  microsoft.com :::: technology
    27   416  24.020  theverge.com :::: tech news
    28   410  24.311  venturebeat.com :::: business news
    29   408  24.600  quantamagazine.org :::: academic / science
    30   407  24.889  cnn.com :::: general news

17,782 sites in total, if I'm reading my past notes correctly.

More on that project in an HN search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

(Individual comments/posts seem presently unreachable due to an HN site bug.)

Further thoughts on article extraction: one idea that comes to mind is including extraction rules in the source selection metadata.

I'm using something along these lines right now to process sections within a given source, where I define the section-distinguishing-element from a headline URL, as well as the plaintext, position (within my generated page), lines of context, and maximum age (days) I'm interested in.

That could be extended or paired with a per-source rule that identifies the htmlq specifiers which pull out title, dateline, and byline elements from the source.

A further challenge is that such specifiers have a tendency to change as the publisher's back-end CMS varies, and finding ways to identify those is ... difficult.

But grist for the mill, at any rate.

How do you decide which stories to include in the list for a given day, and how to rank them?

In timeline mode, it's just a pure top 10/20/50/100 stories by points (or comments, if chosen) for each day (in your time zone). The stories are presented in chronological order in which they were submitted (top is newest).

The timeline view can get wonky when it's like 12AM-2AM when there are relatively few stories in "today".

  Misc:
  1) it doesn't filter out flagged stories
  2) second-chance pooled items, should they rise in ranks, will be shown on the day the item was originally submitted, not the day it got popular.

I may do to a "rising" type of view but I'm curious about what others want to see first.

Thanks for keeping the HN API open for these alternative UIs.

I think more of this is probably in HN's future, if it's to thrive long-term.

The official HN front page is already pretty good on UI density, so it’s promising that you’re using that as a starting point.

Is there any chance https://hcker.news is related to https://hckrnews.com? The dense layout feels similar.

I haven't set up my about page yet but I was going to attribute much my design to their page. I've taken a ton of inspiration from hckernews.com because it's the front page I always frequented prior to making this. My primary issue with it was that I wanted more sorting capabilities (aggregate mode), and wanted to be able to see the highest engagement threads (by comments).

Very cool. I have something similar that's more of a running timeline than a view of the front page. I need to work on the controls so you can better specify thresholds.

https://hnr.app

(hckrnews.com credit in footer because I also found it helpful)

this quite nice as it reminds me of a good ol rss reader.

regarding controls, one of the dumb reasons i wanted to remake hckernews is i don’t like the two taps to change the view.. im happy with the brutalist settings panel up top.

On first look this looks slightly more usable that hckrnews.com, which I'm currently using(mostly).

It would be perfect(for me) if it had some more (light)themes, with yellow-brownish background, like 'manila paper', or something like that.

Will continue trying it out.

Anyways, thumbs up so far...

Added a manilla theme, let me know what you think of it!

Yes. Acceptable. Though it's looking slightly orange/apricot/peachy. But that's in line with HN, so be it ;>

Thank You!

Edit: After a few minutes I'm thinking its better than both hckrnews.com, because that has too bright BG, and less disturbing than HN, because no jump between grey borders and that pale yellow they use. MUCH LESS annoyance/eyestrain.

Awesome. I'll try use the manila theme and tone it down if the peachiness bothers me too.

Also, I'll also have to fix the fact that I've been misspelling "manila". Feel free to email me (in the about page) if there are any other features you'd like to see.

Please add an option to kill the gutter space. You want density and get rid of a substantial part of the viewing space with empty space on the sides.

thanks for the feedback. you can now kill the gutters!

That's great! An API for the filters would be nice so i could bookmark it.

Thanks! By API, do you mean you'd like to have bookmarkable filters so you can always return to a particular view?

Late to comment but this is awesome! I've been a long time user if hckrnews.com. What I'd like to see is it's option to open the links in HackerWeb. It makes reading the discussions much easier on mobile/tablet in my opinion. Another feature request would be font size adjustment. Two columns look great on a tablet but the font size is slightly too small. Keep up the great work!

Just saw this comment, added both a hackerweb and a font size adjustment setting! Look in the finicky settings.

Kudos for building this and for responding to feedback so quickly. I'm a user.

Thanks!

Empty page without JS? Doesn't look like a website for hackers to me.