from Hacker News

Show HN: Hacker Herald – like HN but with crowdsourced pics and subtitles

by MarkMc on 12/6/24, 10:22 AM with 82 comments

• by voodooEntity on 12/6/24, 1:32 PM

  While i have to admit, from all the alternative frontends i have seen over the years (and there have been alot) this is by far the best.

  Tho as many others mention, one of the great things on hackernews is the minimalism / simplicity - and i have to admit its one of the reasons why i always like to go on hackersnews. Just a simple textlist, easy to read, no visual clutter.

  Tho for people that like a more colorfull/stylish layout this might be a good alternative

• by Retr0id on 12/6/24, 3:08 PM

  I notice you're hotlinking the images from their respective sources.

  This isn't ideal from a privacy PoV, because you're basically announcing your presence to tens of different orgs even if you don't click on anything.

  And, some hosts might not appreciate their images being hotlinked - the big sites probably don't care or even notice, but someone's personal blog without a media CDN might end up getting hammered with traffic.

• by Sn0wCoder on 12/6/24, 5:01 PM

  The UI is very nice. Congratulations on the release, with all the articles about releasing the last few days must feel good.

  Does not like my VPN / AdBlocker, getting a few CORS errors connecting to the Amazon S3. If you really want people to use the site would recommend proxying the request through the server. If you are already running a node.js server straightforward to do, if not still a huge leap but would also want to configure Caddy (NGINX) [or run on the same server and block the port] to run the proxy locally and forward only your requests so it does not get abused.

  A lot of the audience here is running AdBlock and / or VPN so others are most likely to hit the same issue.

• by ivanjermakov on 12/6/24, 6:10 PM

  A great example of how little information preview images add to the news/article websites. This is the reason why HN feels so good to read.

• by badcppdev on 12/6/24, 3:13 PM

  I like how this looks but I have a feature suggestion....

  Could you crowd-source categories/tags for the stories and then try and implement an opt-in / opt-out function that lets us exclude certain categories. I'm not even sure if it's possible but you're some of the way there.

• by password4321 on 12/6/24, 1:36 PM

  Thanks for being willing to stick your neck out by putting your own spin on things!

  I'm always interested to hear more about the sustainability of alternative HN frontends... the initial time investment, ongoing hosting costs, etc.

  Maybe it'd be worth doing the research to find out what the probability is of lasting longer than the domain renewal year, especially for those such as this offering the chance for users to invest additional value.

• by mr_mitm on 12/6/24, 12:08 PM

  My first reaction was: this is super cool. I can't say whether I'll stick to it as I often read HN via newsboat and https://hnrss.org/frontpage, but I'll give it a try! Thanks for sharing!

• by cjsawyer on 12/6/24, 6:00 PM

  I prefer the density of the original, but your addition of "Today", "Yesterday", "Wednesday"... buttons is excellent. That is much more useful than the infinite scroll on the vanilla homepage.

• by PaulHoule on 12/6/24, 3:57 PM

  One of the best HN redesigns I've seen in that it's not just "add whitespace" but is a totally different layout.

  My take on social media is that you have to have an image in a post if you want people to engage with it.

• by prophesi on 12/7/24, 12:30 AM

  I'm not sure how the pics/subtitled are crowdsourced, but I'm wondering if it'd fare just as well simply using the OGP protocol? ie, the preview cards we see in most apps/platforms where links are posted. And if they don't have the OGP[0] tags, it could fallback to the crowdsourced solution. Or even let users choose which should be their default, and the ability to swap between the two?

  [0] https://ogp.me/

• by uwemaurer on 12/6/24, 12:26 PM

  Always great to see alternative hackernews frontends!

  I really like the newspaper like layout.

  My own hackernews frontend project is this: https://news.facts.dev/interests

  The goal was to add a quick way to filter by interests

• by Cthulhu_ on 12/6/24, 12:36 PM

  One tip, it might be an idea to create permalinks, so that people can open up the page at any specific date instead of just the past week. I don't know if that's feasible though, is the data for each page generated statically or kept updated?

• by redeux on 12/6/24, 2:28 PM

  Personally, I don’t care for the images on the articles. I find them distracting from the information I actually want, the headline and content. It seems that their purpose is purely aesthetic in this UI, but not a pleasing one for me.

• by sjf on 12/6/24, 3:09 PM

  The site is neat, but the airport article is really the only one that benefits from an image though. It'd be nice to not have to scroll past logos, stock images, etc.

• by JKCalhoun on 12/6/24, 1:02 PM

  I like it. I think you need some kind of ... mascot. Like a town crier with a smart phone up by the banner.

  Is this one scenario where perhaps you should reverse the order of the "tabs" along the top? Like put "Today" on the far right with "Yesterday", etc. following from right to left?

  Or honestly ditch them altogether — adding "Yesterday" is more than enough. Who wants to go back several days to read old news?

• by shahzaibmushtaq on 12/6/24, 1:57 PM

  Thumbs up for the effort, I prefer the default HN outlook.

• by vunderba on 12/6/24, 5:15 PM

  Nice - reminds me of an old RSS reader for iPad that would build out a newspaper looking aesthetic called "The Early Edition" from nearly a decade ago.

  https://www.macstories.net/ipad/the-early-edition

  Sadly it's no longer around.

• by jasfi on 12/6/24, 1:00 PM

  The pics help to disambiguate some of the titles, but its nowhere near as lean as HN.

• by eigilsagafos on 12/6/24, 12:26 PM

  A love that HN doesn’t have pics and that they strive for short meaningful titles, so I’ll stay here :)

• by kimusan on 12/7/24, 8:15 AM

  I would love to get this for the different HN categories like "ask" and "show" (I personally use the "show" part way more than the noisy frontpage)

• by justmarc on 12/6/24, 4:02 PM

  I like it, but I also like the simplicity of HN because I can simply scan all the headlines super efficiently, without any distractions and quickly see if something is of interest.

• by satvikpendem on 12/7/24, 5:09 PM

  For those who want something similar but for YouTube, there's DeArrow, to eschew clickbait thumbnails and titles and replace them with crowdsourced ones.

• by TripleChecker on 12/6/24, 4:20 PM

  I like the re-design. Maybe including the actual date instead of 'Tuesday', 'Monday' in the header might be clearer. Just a thought.

• by yoda97 on 12/6/24, 4:03 PM

  Good effort, but tbh the absence of pictures is actually what I like about HN, that's why I could never get into daily.dev

• by jack_riminton on 12/6/24, 3:22 PM

  Maybe have an option to view the main page as a list (ie copies Hacker News) but then each individual page has the photos?

• by johnea on 12/6/24, 11:08 PM

  The best HN "frontend" is the IRC channel on libera!

• by h1fra on 12/6/24, 6:10 PM

  We really need a hacker news dedicated to hacker news redesign

• by supriyo-biswas on 12/6/24, 1:22 PM

  I'm not sure of some of the feedback being given here - the magazine layout seems to get me focused on stories that are interesting but that wouldn't have caught my attention otherwise.

• by lukasfoisy on 12/6/24, 11:36 AM

  I suspect many folks here enjoy the minimalist Hacker News UI but I, for one, really enjoy what you've put together. It somehow makes me more interested in checking out stories/posts I might have otherwise skipped on the normal UI. I'll give this a spin day-to-day.

  What are your plans for this project?

• by swyx on 12/6/24, 1:35 PM

  > Something went wrong Please try again.

  did we hug it to death?

• by mrbluecoat on 12/6/24, 1:00 PM

  Adding search would be a nice value-add

• by rodary on 12/8/24, 11:03 AM

  To OP: please keep it going.

• by InMice on 12/6/24, 3:58 PM

  Very nice. My compliments to you

• by olegrumiancev on 12/6/24, 4:42 PM

  I think this is beautiful

• by phendrenad2 on 12/6/24, 1:44 PM

  In retrospect, I should have expected the goatse as soon as I clicked to vote on images.

• by croisillon on 12/6/24, 1:17 PM

  i would suggest to add unpaywalled links where relevant

• by rkagerer on 12/6/24, 4:45 PM

  I want to thank you for doing this, but for a different reason: it reminded me how much I appreciate the vanilla HN layout.

  I viscerally HATE all the news sites that look like your project.

  I've sought alternative sources of news with a more old-school look, without success.

  I used to think it wasn't just the pictures. I found the average quality of reporting went down, along with a rise in clickbait headlines and stories, around the same time mainstream outlets adopted the new format. I figured that may have been part of what conditioned me to hate it. But now I realize the cosmetic factor really is quite substantial.

  I like being able to digest lots of information in front of me at once, and the words on the HN site pack in better density (I guess it turns out not every photo is worth a thousand of them). Yes, the timber roof photo looks great. But too many of your crowdsourced pictures feel almost generated, rather than authentic to their associated piece, and I find them distracting.

  Thank you YC, for sticking to your guns and keeping the 'boring' layout all these years!

• by redm on 12/6/24, 12:27 PM

  The saying, “If it ain't broke, don’t fix it,” comes to mind. I’m all for progress, but Hacker News's simplicity and density are its major features.

• by tunnuz on 12/6/24, 3:43 PM

  I love it, I wonder if LLMs couldn't be used to generate some pictures.