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Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper

wolfgangfaust.com

81–90 of 142 posts

Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper

#81
post #69

OMG, how very beautiful ! Is it fully automatic? Will it persist?

Thanks! It’s semi-fully-automatic; right now the generator is running off my laptop as I make tweaks but I plan to set up a cron job shortly. The page will stick around as long as the domain is still up, and I intend to keep it updating, but as it’s something I knocked together over a weekend I make no guarantees.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper

#82
Fantastic. Surprised to find myself with cataracts at my age, HN is so much more readable as presented here, comparable in improvement to viewing it under dark mode.

More importantly, by providing the lead/lede, I've found a few more pieces to read that I didn't know I wanted to read just from the headline.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper

#84
post #72

Are you planning to keep running it? I hope you do, I can definitely see it becoming my default home screen while browsing. It’d be cool to see if you can wrap up the rest of HN, especially comments also. But I do realize that may be a lot of work.

It’ll keep running as long as the cron job doesn’t break. It might even keep running after that, if I get around to doing maintenance, but I’d like to keep expectations low. Worst-case scenario someone can always fork it and leave an issue on the repository explaining where to find the new one.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper

#86

Having worked in print newspaper production, this looks cool, but of course no real newspaper would ever have that much white space.

A few minutes ago I added some extra space because people were complaining and excessively narrow margins have always been a bugbear of mine. Sounds like I may have overdone it a little; I’ve just changed the text to justified (which helps each section look a bit more like a cohesive solid block) and bumped the margins back down a bit.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper

#87

This looks really amazing! I particularly like that it makes good use of the width of an ultra-wide screen. While I wouldn't want it to replace the actual hackernews layout, I can really see it shine for discovering interesting articles whose headlines alone do not tell me enough to identify them as interesting (seems perfect for Friday afternoons). One suggestion: I would appreciate more visual hints to indicate whi…

Thanks for the suggestion! I added some more whitespace and some horizontal rules, what do you think of it now? (Please feel free to tell me it still looks terrible!)

Looks great! This really makes it easier for me to see what belongs where.

Thanks for the quick adjustment! I'm already curious what new things I will find with this site.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper

#89
Wow. I thought this would just be gimmicky, but I kind of... almost actually like it better than the main HN page.

Having text snippets from the first paragraph, and an image, give me waaay more information as to whether something's interesting enough to click. This is really, really nice.

A bunch of random thoughts, hopefully it's useful feedback:

- I don't care about it looking like a "paper", but I love the grid view with image+blurb. So if you could make the top stories the same size as the rest, and make all images color, I'd love that even more

- I find both the upvote count and hours ago added really useful, if you could find a way to include those back in

- Some blurbs are 15 lines long, others are 2. Instead of trying to break at a paragraph boundary, I'd prefer if they were all just a standardized 6-8 lines. I'm glancing just to see what the article is actually about (for when the headline is vague), I don't care if it ends at a sentence ending

- The bold "topic" thing you click on to get to the comments is clever in whatever ML you use to select it... but unfortunately is also meaningless and kind of distracting, so I'd prefer it without

But for real... I think that if you focused on making this a "rich" image+blurb feed for HN instead of the newspaper thing, you could become a super-popular interface for HN.

Kudos!

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