I recently built an HN client [1] to scratch an itch and try out the HN API. It caches data to SQL and redis.
It has never been shared and I only use it personally so expect lots of bugs.
I may open source the code after I clean it up.
Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
21–30 of 40 posts
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#22One thing I'd find useful: - save individual posts as "favorites", and allow users to tag them somehow (e.g. 'finance', or 'front-end') for easy searchability. The saved quote should be available for offline reading, and should link back to the original topic. The original topic doesn't need to be available offline.
You know there is a favorite function already right?
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#23To clarify, why is “self-hosted” an important criteria to you?
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#24To clarify, why is “self-hosted” an important criteria to you?
There have been many HN related websites posted over the years, but a lot end up as dead links. A self-hosted version does not depend on a third party. Another reason is to minimize the round trip latency of contacting a central server. Consider users without a good connection to the server.
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#25To clarify, why is “self-hosted” an important criteria to you?
There have been many HN related websites posted over the years, but a lot end up as dead links. A self-hosted version does not depend on a third party. Another reason is to minimize the round trip latency of contacting a central server. Consider users without a good connection to the server.
What is your use case for this server that makes optimizing for LAN vs WAN latency a valuable outcome? I’ve never really noticed that latency in email clients or when using the HN website and so I’m curious what is unique to your specific scenario that makes it a priority.
(This isn’t criticism, but I definitely don’t understand why it’s a criteria in your case yet.)
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#26A kill file. De-emphasizing comments I have already seen. notifying me of replies to my comments. Notifying me of my submissions that got re-upped while I was sleeping, so I can see the discussion.
I've been missing twit filters for 30 years.
Source: Ran hub for a BBS network. All the offline readers, like SLMR, had twit filters.
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
There have been many HN related websites posted over the years, but a lot end up as dead links. A self-hosted version does not depend on a third party. Another reason is to minimize the round trip latency of contacting a central server. Consider users without a good connection to the server.
What is your use case for this server that makes optimizing for LAN vs WAN latency a valuable outcome? I’ve never really noticed that latency in email clients or when using the HN website and so I’m curious what is unique to your specific scenario that makes it a priority. (This isn’t criticism, but I definitely don’t understand why it’s a criteria in your case yet.)
HN itself is fast, but the comparison I'm making is with readers that use the HN API. See how getting each comment requires an additional API request: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22481199.json?pri...
It's more about the consistency of operating on data local to the user. For example, see this comment referencing how HN paginates threads at 250 comments for performance reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231055 A local database does not have that issue.
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#28Show only top-level comments so you can skip long off-topic discussions and drill-down on the discussions you are interested in.
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#29All posts and comments I’ve upvoted and bookmarked are searchable.
Re: Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?
#30The query api at: https://hn.algolia.com is pretty amazing, searches all stories. The biggest qualms for me would be; notifications of comments and searching my previous comments. Other than that Hacker News is actually highly reliable and available and I've never personally needed an off-line version (except maybe on a plane)
Actually would love to tune the ranking of search as it is biased towards ancient stuff and I always need to switch to sort by date to find the article I actually vaguely recalled seeing recently. In Elasticsearch I would probably add some function scoring on dates, points, and number of comments. Also comment search is indeed not really a thing currently and there are some nice opportunities to find related stories, likely duplicates, etc. that might help people when posting new stories.
IMHO the default HN ui has many quite obvious UX issues on mobile with e.g. tiny click targets that are positioned close together, long threads that are hard to navigate, low contrast colors (grey on grey), etc. It's clearly not been designed with mobile in mind and even on desktop it's not all that good. Brutalist/retro is the best you can say about it and that looks like it's intentional to me.
If you read HN on the way to work in an area that doesn't have great mobile coverage in e.g. subway tunnels, etc. offline support would be pretty nice.
There are various Android clients that do some interesting things with the UX (e.g. thread navigation, swipe to upvote, etc.) and offline usage. However, most of them fall a bit short when it comes to things like commenting or other features. Most of the clients I tried did not cover all the features.