Great. It's a good idea to have a HN-like platform with a narrower focus. Another idea would be to add focus areas to HN itself, maybe similar to subreddits. When I currently scan the "new" pages, I find less than 3% of the posts interesting.
Personally I like the fact that some days I find very little of interest. It keeps me focused. Sometimes there can be too much content in our daily lives.
Well, then just don't look at it and focus on other things; that's what I do; but when I then come back later it's practically impossible to keep up and scan the whole stuff just to find the very few interesting posts; it would be much more efficient (with a positive effect on the ability to concentrate on the essential things) to just scan a pre-selected focus area.
Honestly I think this is a feature, not a bug. I like that there's a bunch of things I don't find interesting. Sometimes I'll read stuff in not drawn to anyway, mostly just for the (typically) insightful commentary on this site. I've learned countless new things because of it, and things I didn't find immediately interesting turned into a topic of interest.
Case in point: the other day there was a posting about scanning old scrolls for text, and I found the topic dull. Reading the commentary I learn about the Ea-Nasir tabled[1] and found it both amusing and interesting. I also learned there's a whole subreddit dedicated to this topic, and reading through some of the funnies I decided to go back and read the actual article about scanning the scrolls. I then learned much more than I thought I wanted to learn about true intricate process and labor involved in doing this work, and found it quite interesting indeed.
So yeah, I'd much rather a high percentage of posts on this site continue to be about topics I have no immediate interest in, because you never know...
When something seems boring on HN I open it and go straight to the comments.
Also, I have this weird effect, when reading something not on HN, in the end I forget, and look for the button wondering what HN has to say about it. The disappointment each and every time..
This is going to sound overly simplistic, but maybe don't scan "new", then? Just look at the front page, where the stuff that interests people has bubbled up. And if nothing there interests you, maybe your interests have simply diverged from what the rest of HN finds interesting. There is nothing wrong with that from either side.
"When I currently scan the "new" pages, I find less than 3% of the posts interesting."
I find general News sites unreadable. Just trash, shitloads of advertisements, they try to blur the line between news and advertisement. You can't even navigate this stuff without an adblocker.
Using an RSS reader with selected feeds, helps a lot. Especially since you will have many blogs that rarely post something and without an RSSReader you would not be able to follow them.
I'm talking about this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest; it's just every post in chronological order. The selective RSS reader only helps if someone (or a good individualized algorithm) has done the selection.
I like how random/catch-all it is. I don’t have to go through a million subs and just check what’s there and always find something interesting and unique. It’s why I hang in resetera.com (etc) even though I can’t stand the community.
Does it matter? If I submit a link that doesn't interest HNers, it won't be voted for or commented on and will have basically no effect on anybody here.
I wonder if it would be interesting to make a blog that looks like the HN UI. Then when you click a link it shows the full article first rather than the comment thread. It's a nice minimalistic design imo.
I use an RSS reader and see the title, the link to the article, and the link to the comment thread. This is currently my favourite way to read HN and I think there’s benefit to having both be only one click away
Love the idea! However, it seems that you’re running a non-mobile friendly version of the hacker news design. Making it responsive would be greatly appreciated!
Yeah. I need to work on the mobile version. Just haven't had time. An TBH I know little about responsive design. Where should I start?
It's currently set up on a VPS running news.arc in a screen session connected to the Internet via Cloudflare Tunnel. If it falls over while I'm out today... sorry!
Use @media queries to modify the CSS rules. The bare-bones approach is a breakpoint around 1024 width where everything below is 100% width (with a small margin/padding if you like). That way smaller tablets and phones have a decent experience without horizontal scrollbars.
My initial reaction is that this is yet another place in a growing list for retro stuff, and many of the very active retro people are already sharing news and interesting links on Reddit, Xitter, Bluesky and the Fediverse; for example, I see Ken Shirriff is well represented on OP's site, but I am following him and others, and converse directly with them, on the socials anyway.
The saving grace is that, as an aggregator, there's an rss feed so the site contents can come my way rather than needing to go have a looksee, however I am more likely to comment elsewhere where I have an established account rather than create yet another one to use and manage for yet another site to visit.
Idea: what if we had a "federated" network of hacker news like sites based on ActivityPub?
I understand that there are already federated reddit clones but I think this may be a cool project to learn more about ActivityPub.
> Idea: what if we had a "federated" network of hacker news like sites based on ActivityPub?
HackerNews is already a news aggregation service, just like Reddit, countless other Reddit clones, lobste.rs, and most fediverse platforms.
Just drop by one of the many Lemmy servers and create a community. There's no need to overcomplicate things. You can even create and manage your own instance if that's your thing.
You may have missed the last sentence of my comment. I just think it could be a nice thing to create for educational reasons, I'm aware of lemmys existence.
First, I love the idea, and thank you for building this.
I have some accessibility feedback on your blog, though, which I'm just now reading. The visited link color is nearly indistinguishable from the body text. I returned to some pages to revisit links and couldn't find them without close inspection.
Seems like what people do in Reddit where they want to make a separate subreddit and it ends up being a waste. Why not post these links here? I would read them.
Readit News
Case in point: the other day there was a posting about scanning old scrolls for text, and I found the topic dull. Reading the commentary I learn about the Ea-Nasir tabled[1] and found it both amusing and interesting. I also learned there's a whole subreddit dedicated to this topic, and reading through some of the funnies I decided to go back and read the actual article about scanning the scrolls. I then learned much more than I thought I wanted to learn about true intricate process and labor involved in doing this work, and found it quite interesting indeed.
So yeah, I'd much rather a high percentage of posts on this site continue to be about topics I have no immediate interest in, because you never know...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir
* Exposure to related, but outside-my-usual interests.
* Keep informed about what gets ppl in other fields exited, or where tech like AI, bio sciences, renewables etc are heading.
* "Today I Learned:"...
Also, I have this weird effect, when reading something not on HN, in the end I forget, and look for the button wondering what HN has to say about it. The disappointment each and every time..
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https://hckrnews.com/
I find general News sites unreadable. Just trash, shitloads of advertisements, they try to blur the line between news and advertisement. You can't even navigate this stuff without an adblocker.
Using an RSS reader with selected feeds, helps a lot. Especially since you will have many blogs that rarely post something and without an RSSReader you would not be able to follow them.
Obviously: https://hnrss.org/frontpage
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Have you tried this website called reddit.com? It's just chock full of interesting things and rational discussions. You'll love it there.
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It's currently set up on a VPS running news.arc in a screen session connected to the Internet via Cloudflare Tunnel. If it falls over while I'm out today... sorry!
Use @media queries to modify the CSS rules. The bare-bones approach is a breakpoint around 1024 width where everything below is 100% width (with a small margin/padding if you like). That way smaller tablets and phones have a decent experience without horizontal scrollbars.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css, specifically the @media parts
The saving grace is that, as an aggregator, there's an rss feed so the site contents can come my way rather than needing to go have a looksee, however I am more likely to comment elsewhere where I have an established account rather than create yet another one to use and manage for yet another site to visit.
HackerNews is already a news aggregation service, just like Reddit, countless other Reddit clones, lobste.rs, and most fediverse platforms.
Just drop by one of the many Lemmy servers and create a community. There's no need to overcomplicate things. You can even create and manage your own instance if that's your thing.
I checked and there's already a retro gaming community in Lemmy.
https://lemmy.world/c/retrogaming
I have some accessibility feedback on your blog, though, which I'm just now reading. The visited link color is nearly indistinguishable from the body text. I returned to some pages to revisit links and couldn't find them without close inspection.