Show HN: hcker.news – an ergonomic, timeline-based Hacker News front page
146 postalcoder 67 5/23/2025, 6:44:31 PM hcker.news ↗
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.
- 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).
- 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.
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.
I can't even imagine another site with that much usage of alternative clients; maybe Reddit before their controversial API changes?
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).
You can have a modal, and multi-step CAPTCHA in CSS, so it should be relatively easy to just stick to CSS for this functionality.
Perhaps, you should send a pull request to add this.
http://fastHNreader.com
And I saw this post from it :)
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.
I am curious how different the features and design were around the time of the fork.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit (2005)
That's a fun read. Hats off for Aaron.
Usually not a fan of abnormal scrolling, but that's a good time.
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
btw, to those who want a dark mode for hcrknews, try: https://hckrnews.com/beta/
It's just jarring though to switch the actual Hacker News comment section from the site.
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.
Does one exist already?
There's no api for that (I don't think?), but I'm not averse to scraping. I suppose it'd work decently as a fourth view.
Would you want to just see it as a list of comments or also in a timeline view as well?
I would just have a timeline of all comments that become best. It could be sorted by how new they are to any thread since being submitted to it, or, how new they are to actually becoming classified as a best comment. Former: "freshest best comments" Latter: "newest best comments"
To make it really nice, show each comment, and be able to close it from viewing and then remember the state between sessions. That way people can go through each comment and they don't have to read it twice - they've already closed it after having read it. A bit like an RSS reader. Or the person could even delete read or ignored comments. Wait maybe an alternative to all this is to provide 2 rss feeds of previous timelines: new/fresh.
!!
* 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
clarified in the about page.
> Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params
Working on this
> 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.
Makes sense i'll give it a shot.
Thanks for the suggestions, open to more if you think of any!
edit: I broke something yesterday and just fixed it. Thanks for the heads up. I tried to put some thought into making it useable on mobile, hope you try it again.
Well done! I will be using it.
Other than that I like it and will use it instead of hckrnews
How about view by #comments (besides time / #points)?
What does the colored vertical bar to the left of some posts represent?