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

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

cloverich · a year ago

For me, I think the lack of more generalized appeal of the interface is a net benefit, because it limits its appeal to only those that are most interested in the content. When it becomes too nice, and the audience too large, it will probably lose the thing that most of us are here (as opposed to reddit) for.

So even though I really like (and will bookmark!) this new interface design, I hope HN proper never changes.

amelius · a year ago

It is ironic that the people responsible for most of the UX cruft on the internet (i.e., us programmers) prefer such minimalism in their interfaces.

dbtc · a year ago

The dealer knows best what the drug will do.

thorncorona · a year ago

i think most designers think hn is ugly lol

written-beyond · a year ago

I like the minimal interface, gives an old.reddit.com vibe. HN is horrible to use on mobile though. Everything is tiny, difficult to tap I miss tap every 3 taps

IOT_Apprentice · a year ago

Try using octal as a hacker news client. I recommend it

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.

wmeredith · a year ago

I had the same thought. Hot linking images has been bad form since like 2004, if not earlier.

ipaddr · a year ago

Copying images is a copyright issue.

rfl890 · a year ago

If you're posting content on HN, you should always expect a traffic increase anyways. And Cloudflare CDN is free anyways (unless you don't want to use it for political reasons, your choice)... Although I understand hotlinking is frowned-upon in a general context

voodooEntity · a year ago

Retr0id · a year ago

Sn0wCoder · a year ago

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.

ivanjermakov · a year ago

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.

badcppdev · a year ago

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.

kirubakaran · a year ago

You might like this: https://histre.com/hn/

(Disclosure: I made it)

rrr_oh_man · a year ago

Care to share how you do the tagging?

MarkMc · a year ago

Thanks that's a good idea! I think I'd need to use AI to categorise each story, then maybe have different tabs on the page for each category...

password4321 · a year ago

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.

mr_mitm · a year ago

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!

cjsawyer · a year ago

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.

kayge · a year ago

This other alternative interface might interest you: https://hckrnews.com/

Fairly high density, divided by day, and able to reduce down to groups of Top 10 / Top 20 / Top 50%.

This is my go-to since Top 10 is about all I have time for these days :)