This doesn't look like a print newspaper. Print newspapers are much denser (in general) and have different headline sizes to emphasize the editor's choice of stories. This looks like a corporate blog home page or something. Some people will like this presentation; I'm pretty happy with HN as it is. But congratulations on shipping!
Thanks for the feedback! Print newspaper's have curation, which this lacks. I guess the main thing it takes from newspapers is the image and blurb that help give you a preview of the story.
There is a form of curation on HN and "editorial judgment" on HN and that's in the points a post has. A closer approximation of a newspaper would be possible by looking at the points of a post and maybe comparing that to other posts and then sizing headlines appropriately based on how "important" the HN community sees a given story.
I kept it running for 5 or 10 years but eventually let it die.
edit: I'm not hating on OP btw. their version has pics, which mine doesn't. just agreeing that I believe the visual hierarchy inherent to newspaper title design is an important benefit of the format.
I made this to experiment with embeddings and explore how different ways of displaying information affect your perception.
It gets the top 100 stories, sends their html to GPT-4 to extract the main content (this was not producing good enough results with html parsing) and then gets an embedding using the title and content.
Likes/dislikes are stored in local storage and compared against all stories using cosine similarity to find the most relevant stories.
It costs about $10/day to run. I was thinking of offering additional value for a small subscription. Maybe more pages of the newspaper, full story content/comments, a weekly digest or ePub export or something?
This is pretty cool, it’s nice to have a clean interface that puts more focus on individual posts (as articles here) rather than tons of headlines where I feel I skim over posts a lot more (particularly the post about Jupiter only caught my attention on your site, not the front page).
I’d like if there was some support for customising it without liking and disliking so I could push topics I’m interested in first (e.g. those tagged with emacs). It would also be nice to hide the like and dislike buttons in general as it gives more of a social media feel that the newspaper style UI does well to shake.
This is very nice! If you
- make it a pwa/web clip
- link to the discussions
- make the images colored again
I’d use it over the regular hacker news ui any day. I know your use case is printing it out, but it’s fantastic for usage on a tablet.
There was an iOS app from practically a decade ago that did something very similar, but you could customize with RSS feeds, and it would turn it into a traditional looking newspaper.
Sadly, I can't remember the name of it but it was pretty great.
A fun evolution would be to format it into a newspaper format, complete with headlines, front page, and "continue reading on page N", then print it out on large paper, fold it, and mail it to you.
There's probably no money in it, but a physical weekly customized RSS feed highlights newspaper would be neat.
The print stylesheets are also kind of broken. With my printer's default margins, the page becomes an overlapping mess: https://i.imgur.com/lTlFz4l.png
This doesn't look like a print newspaper. Print newspapers are much denser (in general) and have different headline sizes to emphasize the editor's choice of stories. This looks like a corporate blog home page or something. Some people will like this presentation; I'm pretty happy with HN as it is. But congratulations on shipping!
For the rest of the news in a more HN-like format (at least at the top level) you might like https://lite.cnn.com/
https://text.npr.org is also a text only version of npr
Also this site works great in text browsers like Lynx.
Thanks for the feedback! Print newspaper's have curation, which this lacks. I guess the main thing it takes from newspapers is the image and blurb that help give you a preview of the story.
There is a form of curation on HN and "editorial judgment" on HN and that's in the points a post has. A closer approximation of a newspaper would be possible by looking at the points of a post and maybe comparing that to other posts and then sizing headlines appropriately based on how "important" the HN community sees a given story.
Yes, I agree. I think I will change the design to have a hierarchy.
this is exactly how my 2009 version (in my previous comment) chose to size and space its headlines
I agree, but I'm biased. I built basically the same app as OP back in 2009 and it had different headline sizes like a newspaper:
https://github.com/gilesbowkett/hacker_newspaper/blob/master...
I kept it running for 5 or 10 years but eventually let it die.
edit: I'm not hating on OP btw. their version has pics, which mine doesn't. just agreeing that I believe the visual hierarchy inherent to newspaper title design is an important benefit of the format.
Yeah… it’s really just not plausible at all…
I made this to experiment with embeddings and explore how different ways of displaying information affect your perception.
It gets the top 100 stories, sends their html to GPT-4 to extract the main content (this was not producing good enough results with html parsing) and then gets an embedding using the title and content.
Likes/dislikes are stored in local storage and compared against all stories using cosine similarity to find the most relevant stories.
It costs about $10/day to run. I was thinking of offering additional value for a small subscription. Maybe more pages of the newspaper, full story content/comments, a weekly digest or ePub export or something?
Anyone remember "Hacker Monthly"? Years ago it was a monthly PDF with nicely laid out copies of popular articles that had been highly voted on here.
They also printed physical magazines and shipped them out. It was the first time I received a professionally printed copy of something I had authored.
This is pretty cool, it’s nice to have a clean interface that puts more focus on individual posts (as articles here) rather than tons of headlines where I feel I skim over posts a lot more (particularly the post about Jupiter only caught my attention on your site, not the front page).
I’d like if there was some support for customising it without liking and disliking so I could push topics I’m interested in first (e.g. those tagged with emacs). It would also be nice to hide the like and dislike buttons in general as it gives more of a social media feel that the newspaper style UI does well to shake.
Nice! I recently worked on a chrome extension that personalizes the frontpage based on embeddings.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-explorer/amiaaon...
Amazing..and you're telling me you made this with less than 600 programmers?
This is very nice! If you - make it a pwa/web clip - link to the discussions - make the images colored again I’d use it over the regular hacker news ui any day. I know your use case is printing it out, but it’s fantastic for usage on a tablet.
There was an iOS app from practically a decade ago that did something very similar, but you could customize with RSS feeds, and it would turn it into a traditional looking newspaper.
Sadly, I can't remember the name of it but it was pretty great.
I remember this app as well; “Flipreader” comes to mind but yields no Google results.
It was the peak of RSS for me, beautiful UX, customizable, all the posts in sequential order if I wanted instead of algorithms…
I remember it because useless when web publishers realized they were losing ad views to apps like these and all the posts became previews with links.
I believe you are thinking of Flipboard (still around, but a bit different nowadays).
I think you are referring to Flipboard, it is still in the AppStore
A fun evolution would be to format it into a newspaper format, complete with headlines, front page, and "continue reading on page N", then print it out on large paper, fold it, and mail it to you.
There's probably no money in it, but a physical weekly customized RSS feed highlights newspaper would be neat.
Flipboard. https://about.flipboard.com/
Good attempt but from the title I thought it would look like an actual print news paper
Very cool! Looks like it has an XSS vector though :P
https://i.imgur.com/5bbKiFc.png
The print stylesheets are also kind of broken. With my printer's default margins, the page becomes an overlapping mess: https://i.imgur.com/lTlFz4l.png
And even with margins turned off, stories are split "across" pages in a way that makes them useless for printing: https://i.imgur.com/SvmTGa8.png Need to pay more attention to your "break-inside" properties: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/break-insid... (and switch from using JS-generated absolute styles to using a CSS column layout or masonry grid)
Thank you! I missed that in my sleepiness. Should be fixed now.
Very cool, seems like it updates on a delay though, which will probably kill usability.
This post is not even on it.
It updates every hour. This post is on it now!
On brand with newspapers.
Looks like the NYT
The images in the website are in grayscale.
I thought it would fit the grayscale of newspapers. I can add an option to show them in color.
For those who prefer scrolling to reading I guess.
Love this project! I would love to collab, please consider open-sourcing this project, or let me know if I can contribute in some way
This is nice, but I prefer the simpler style of hckrnews.com