I've been using this for awhile now as my primary HN front-page interface, for several reasons:
- easier to read
- mobile-browser friendly
- auto refreshes
- preserves articles that make it to the front page, and in (reverse) order of the time they made it to the front page, so no need to constantly check the front page and parse all of its contents to see if new articles are posted
that's a feature. with hckrnews you get to see all the articles, even if they were only on the front page for a short time. for me, that's the biggest advantage it has over the main site.
I wish this one looked the same on iOS 7 as it does on e.g. Chrome desktop. Instead it's doing some sort of app-like thing to retain iOS 6 styling, and the address bar and bottom toolbar never disappear, so the available screen real estate is very limited. At least it makes comments readable, though.
I don't have an iOS device anymore, and I never used that site when I did, so I forgot it did the fake-iOS thing. I definitely prefer the non-iOS theme. It looks and works great on FxOS.
Yes, this gets my vote hands down. hckrnews looks fine but hn.premii gets mobile right. I use it on my mobile and on my desktop all the time. Only downside is that you can't write comments.
I don't mind the classic HN layout - in fact I kind of like it because it's clean way to present information. And all the other designs of HN have added nothing but a reskin. Where as that one actually contributes a original (to HN) ideas itself.
What I don't like about Hacker News is that interesting things fall out of front page too quickly and discussion dies I prefer interface where interesting stuff stays at the top longer (amount of comments last week approximate it well in my view).
You should take a look at http://www.hndigest.com . You can subscribe to get emails at specified intervals (daily all the way to weekly) and choose from top 5-30 stories per email.
There have been many alt HN interfaces. I try them all, yet I never end up sticking with any of them. I feel like HN meets its needs pretty well and I like that they have resisted change (whether consciously or not)
I think the happy medium is one of the browser extensions. I'm using "Hacker New" for Chrome, and it adds basic nice things like default larger text, comment collapsing. Of course, I get used to it and become annoyed if I decide to visit the unmodified HN on my mobile device.
I hacked a Greasemonkey script a while ago because I wanted some easy way to pick out vote/comments. I've been using it for many months now and it's not annoyed me once, which is a good sign. It also leaves the rest of HN alone.
I used to use this interface, but then I noticed a bug (or interesting feature, depending on your point of view) in that when you were viewing the top 10 or top 20, and loaded more articles, some articles would disappear from the list.
My theory on this is that it was caused by loading articles a certain number of hours back from the current time, and then grouping by day before sorting to the top X.
For example, if the last 24 hours were loaded, and grouped into today and (part of) yesterday, you would get an accurate top X for today so far, and an accurate top X for the portion of the previous day it had fetched.
This was particularly noticeable when I hadn't visited for a few days (I've since rectified this aberrant behavior of mine) and loaded a few past days to review missed submissions. Seeing something that caught my eye disappear as it loaded older content drove me nuts.
It looks like the problem is fixed now, but it's hard to be sure, as it may be more or less likely depending on the time of the day you visit.
I sent a bug report to the developer when I noticed this (in February 2013), but never heard back. I'll happily go back to using this interface if it's fixed though, I found it generally more pleasant to use.
There were definitely some bugs around the filtering / content loading. I _think_ they've been resolved for a while now, so I hope you'll give it another shot.
No problem. I definitely will, because I'm enough of a completist in general that it bothers me when feel I've missed something that looks interesting, and I'm already seeing that again. Well done, you've created something that immediately triggers (because I can see what I was missing) and alleviates (because I can check what I missed) my obsessive behavior over HN. Next step, profit as I throw money at you... ;)
Oh, and if you're looking for recommendations on new features:
1. Colorize submissions that have had X% increase in votes/comments (with different colors) since last visit when in top X mode (specifically in the past 48-72 hours).
2. Allow a user defined point/comment threshold over which submissions are colorized.
I welcome this, but the UI confuses immediately: what's top 10 and top 20? and top 50%? No obvious explanations as to what the referent of "top" is! No scales, no FAQ.
Also, I want to know what the settings are compared with the "official" HN frontpage ordering.
"about" is broken, where I had hoped to find a FAQ
I was using it and it's great but the biggest annoyance is the fact that if I wanted to comment, I still had to go to the original HN... So I started using this extension:
I use the HN Enhancement Suite. It adds some good functionality as well as making the interface pretty (but not overly web 6.0-y with thin-weight helvetica and white space everywhere.)
I have started using it few months ago and I like it. Mostly because I can read hacker news as pragmatically as I have been reading google reader. I don't need to visit home of HN several times a day to find out if there is any new posts. I just open hckrnews.com and I see what have been posted since my last visit.
It would be nice to collapse or skip all replies to a parent, do any of these extensions do that? I often find some discussion that is uninteresting to me (but might be others for others) and just want to easily get past it. If it is long, it takes some time to find where the indention matches-up many PGDNs below.
What do you guys use on your phone (if you use an app on the phone)? I have been using an app called "Hacker News 2" in the play store. I generally like it, but the comments are flaky, sometimes it lets me see them and other times it doesn't.
Comparing the lists between new.ycombinator.com and www.hckrnews.com some articles on top 10 on the first are missing on the second is that intended and I didn't understand how it works?
I wish I had a screenshot of hubski.com at its inception. Since it began life as a port (albeit with completely different mechanics) the UI was essentially a clone. Quite quickly mk transformed that along with the usually feature and performance iterations to the point where you'd never be able to tell at a glance.
Just celebrated the first 100,000 posts milestone too.
- easier to read
- mobile-browser friendly
- auto refreshes
- preserves articles that make it to the front page, and in (reverse) order of the time they made it to the front page, so no need to constantly check the front page and parse all of its contents to see if new articles are posted
cf. http://www.hckrnews.com/about.html
a big Thank You and kudos to its author(s) and maintainer(s)-- it works well and consistently!