from Hacker News

Show HN: hcker.news – an ergonomic, timeline-based Hacker News front page

by postalcoder on 5/23/25, 6:44 PM with 82 comments

Hi folks,

I've built an alternative Hacker News front page. It is inspired by and meant to be a replacement for hckrnews.com.

I built this because HN is woefully underfeatured, but most sites that try to improve it seem to assume that the visual design is the problem. hcker.news tries to maintain HN's familiarity while adding useful enhancements.

There are three primary views:

  - Timeline View: Browse top stories by votes or comments grouped by day, week, or month (e.g., top 20 per day, top 100 per week).  
  - Aggregate View: See top stories by votes or comments over custom time ranges.  
  - Front Page View: The original HN front page, untouched.
Feed Filtering:

  - Kagi Small Web: View only stories from websites that are a part of Kagi's Small Web, which is a curated list of non-commercial blogs
  - Custom Keyword Filters: Include/exclude keywords (e.g., include "Rust," exclude "DOGE") or set a minimum score threshold.
  - No HN Algorithm: Timeline and Aggregate Views show stories usually downranked by the HN algo (e.g., flagged posts or those with too many comments).
UI:

  - Unread Flags: Quickly spot new stories or ones you haven't seen.
  - Two Layouts: Classic HN style or a compact story view inspired by hckrnews.com.
  - Multi-column & High-density Modes: Fit more content on screen.
  - Themes: Light, Dark, and Manila.
I'd love your feedback and suggestions. Cheers!

  • by jasonthorsness on 5/23/25, 7:21 PM

    One of the strengths of hacker news is how the core site hasn't really changed (no broken links on any story back to ~2007 as far as I can tell). This steadiness is a rare and valuable feature.

    The fact that they do this yet also expose the data and access to enable a proliferation of cool alternatives views like this one is extremely user-friendly. Unfortunately, the rest of the internet seems to be going in a different direction and locking things down.

  • by koito17 on 5/23/25, 9:48 PM

    Noticed the site flickers when loading. Out of curiosity, I disabled JavaScript and reloaded the site. Unfortunately, the site doesn't work at all without JavaScript, whereas the official Hacker News frontend handles this use-case well.

    I understand browsing without JavaScript isn't considered a valid use-case nowadays, but it would be nice if the site performed some sort of server-side data fetching. That way users don't experience flickering. As a bonus, while waiting for JavaScript to load, users can at least see headlines (but maybe not stories; that's totally fine).

  • by coolwulf on 5/23/25, 7:35 PM

    I built a native rust based hacker news client (open source on github):

    http://fastHNreader.com

    And I saw this post from it :)

  • by ls-a on 5/23/25, 7:51 PM

    Since no one is able to come close to HN UI/UX for many years, I wonder if HN used a UI/UX designer. If so then shout out to that designer

  • by wvl on 5/23/25, 9:43 PM

    Perhaps an inspired by https://hckrnews.com would be appropriate on the site?

    btw, to those who want a dark mode for hcrknews, try: https://hckrnews.com/beta/

  • by nico on 5/23/25, 8:22 PM

    Very cool, thank you for sharing

    One thing that I miss, that I use a lot on HN, is the hide feature. It helps me clear the clutter of stuff that I either already read or am not going to read

  • by adrianwaj on 5/24/25, 12:44 AM

    I made a site called Hackerbrain a while back. #13 here: https://hackerbits.com/hacker-news/improve-hacker-news-ui/

    One of the best things about it (as mentioned in article) is the ability to see the top comment on any item very quickly.

    Try it here:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20180804173424/http://hackerbra....

    Press "top" on any item. Also try the number on each.

    Note how the comments can toggle open/shut and the colors.

    I would definitely use that feature. :)

    Also note the byline indents, curved boxes, spacing and popups on each single comment link.

  • by Brajeshwar on 5/24/25, 4:08 AM

    There is an "Awesome Hacker News" at https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news

    Perhaps, you should send a pull request to add this.

  • by aryan14 on 5/23/25, 9:59 PM

    Doesn’t look good on mobile, difficult to use

  • by insane_dreamer on 5/24/25, 3:51 PM

    Just tried it on mobile—works very nicely. One thing you could consider would be the ability to upvote a post from the hcker news page (ie you click on a link and read the post and then you come back to hcker page (close other tab) and want to upvote it but don’t necessarily want to go to the commments page. You’d have to be logged in to HN already, I presume. Not sure if this is even possible, just mentioning FWIW

  • by arvinsim on 5/24/25, 1:56 AM

    I appreciate the option to use dark mode and customize the font size.

    It's just jarring though to switch the actual Hacker News comment section from the site.

  • by emmanueloga_ on 5/23/25, 10:11 PM

    I like it! Suggestions:

    * Clarify relationship with https://hckrnews.com/

    * Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params. That has a lot of usability improvements including being able to share the state, bookmark it, and heads up the current state. Use Rison [1] for the URL params to make it nice to read.

    * The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence.

    --

    1: https://github.com/kou64yama/rison2?tab=readme-ov-file

  • by conroydave on 5/23/25, 8:18 PM

    i like this a lot. any chance you can do the settings in as a url parameter so we can bookmark our preferred configuration?

  • by pravosleva on 5/24/25, 9:58 AM

    Need to have ability to read comments tree. Check out my exp: https://pravosleva.pro/dist.hacker-news-2024/#/news/44075353

  • by atomic128 on 5/23/25, 8:18 PM

    "Random recent" browsing is the best way to read Hacker News. It's not addictive, it gives you a quick sample of what people are thinking about recently, prevents your own biases from narrowing your view, etc. For example, https://rnsaffn.com/zg2/ where each page refresh gives you a random post, plus its parent thread, plus some detail about that post's author's history.

  • by feep on 5/23/25, 11:02 PM

    Very nice. Thanks.

    Any plans for rss?

    I currently use https://hnrss.github.io/ (another great project), but the additional filters (once they are available as params) would be nice for rss.

    As long as I am here, thanks to whoever is responsible for https://hckrnews.com, too.

  • by dan_voronov on 5/24/25, 10:05 AM

    Thank you very much, it looks very cool. Personally, I miss the *hotkeys* because it's not very convenient to constantly click "show" on the automatically collapsing settings block.

  • by bosky101 on 5/24/25, 6:19 AM

    Would have been good if the familiar navbar would have been retained. Btw /show gave 404. Trivial to support those urls. The filters were too tough to find.

  • by _august on 5/23/25, 7:41 PM

    This is awesome! As someone who's trying to be less chronically online, but still wants to keep on top of what's new I love this.

  • by insane_dreamer on 5/23/25, 10:00 PM

    Great design!

    How about view by #comments (besides time / #points)?

    What does the colored vertical bar to the left of some posts represent?

  • by gloosx on 5/24/25, 10:52 AM

    >>static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/vcd15cbe7772f49c399c6a5babf22c1241717689176015

    Why?

  • by stevenwliao on 5/23/25, 8:05 PM

    Thank you for the keyword filter!

  • by auraham on 5/24/25, 7:40 AM

    Great design! What did you use for the drawer in the mobile version? I love it!

  • by adrianwaj on 5/23/25, 9:57 PM

    Seeing something like this for /bestcomments would be great too. :)

    Does one exist already?

  • by gaws on 5/27/25, 3:49 PM

    Why? RSS exists, and it's lightning fast.

  • by pglevy on 5/23/25, 7:20 PM

    Mobile responsiveness?

  • by stevenally on 5/23/25, 7:54 PM

    This is great. Love the small web filter.

    Well done! I will be using it.

  • by looking4job on 5/23/25, 8:10 PM

    I like that it’s inspired by hckrnews.com but it’s not installed like a pwa, it just opens as a new tab when I add it to the iOS home screen. Hckrnews behaves much more like an app without browser chrome.

    Other than that I like it and will use it instead of hckrnews

  • by freediver on 5/23/25, 7:37 PM

    Love the inclusion of Small Web filter!

  • by dbacar on 5/23/25, 7:47 PM

    i find your design easier on my eyes and the content much more accessible. Congratulations.

  • by ganisgan on 5/23/25, 7:07 PM

    So cool! Thanks for this!

  • by AtroxDev on 5/23/25, 8:54 PM

    Really like your UI! Built something similar for myself (also as an replacement for hckrnews.com): https://hnhub.dev/

  • by thewinnie on 5/23/25, 7:02 PM

    Hey, I just saw this post from hckrnews . com and want to say that I use it everyday! Thank you its a great website!

  • by tonymet on 5/23/25, 10:06 PM

    too big