About

updated 2022-08-27

This site is a personal client to Hacker News' front page.

It is also an opinionated redo of Brian Lovin's personal Hacker News client. Lovin had gripes with Hacker News' layout and content refreshing schedule which I share. However, I prefer a slightly different solution to those same gripes:

Typography, Layout & Colors

Lovin's site had much-improved colors, layout and type contrast than HackerNews. A few nitpicks:

• Serif Typeface

  Unfortunately, Lovin recently updated his HN client to use a monospace font for every element—titles, comments, headers, and body. The well-crafted iA Quattro typeface is a lovely and hacker-y choice, but I prefer serif typefaces for body text.

• Text Wrapping

  Likely due to the monospace body font, a sentence of text often wraps over many lines. This causing a annoying line-length / eye wrapping rhythm. Using a typeface with narrower leading ameliorates this.

• Page Reflow

  Comments take up a lot of vertical space, and collpasing a lengthy parent comment causes the following content to scoot up on the page. This often makes me lose my place in the conversation. I also compensate for this by scrolling the page when the user collapses a comment.

• Thematic Colors

  Lovin added a dark mode to HN—hallelujah! Lovin also preferred a more black & white color sceheme, whereas HN's orange flavor is iconic—so my site's color palette uses HN's orange with warm derivates.

Content Loading & Filtering

Lovin's site only loads posts every 4 hours, to combat HackerNews' addicitivity. Excellent! I extend this to cover 2 corner cases:

• ~Coming soon~: Rate Limiting your Attention / Filtering Content

  The new set of top posts sometimes contains links from the previous batch. I will ensure only new posts are shown with each batch.

  Further, I'm planning to use cookies to filter for posts the user has already seen. This will encourage paying more attention on the first exposure to a story; once it's gone, it's gone!

• Unripe content

  The discussions on HackerNews posts are half my enjoyment! Sometimes, Lovin's site shows new posts too early, aka before users have posted good comments. My client waits for the comments posts to ripen a bit by only showing front-page posts after they're 5h old.

Other UX

• Tap Targets

  The button to collapse comment threads is a bit too small for my thumb. I embiggened it.

• Browser history hijacking?

  Sometimes, on my iPhone, going back from an article link on Lovin's site caused Safari to hang, requiring a full-reload of his page to become interactive again.....but only sometimes. No clue why!