Live data from Hacker News

Other ways to read Hacker News

hackerbits.com

21–30 of 191 posts

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#22
Ok, so all of those are for reading, but I don't see any that would allow voting and commenting on HN. It's also the case with pretty much all other HN apps/interfaces I've seen (with notable exception of HN Enhancement Suite, which is a browser extension).

I don't understand why that is. Is there some important rule of HN that disallows any third-party interaction except through the official interface? Or do people simply treat viewing HN as a MVP, and give up after making it?

As it is, those tools seem only useful for HN readers / lurkers, not that much for those of us who participate in discussions here.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#23

just use https://news.ycombinator.com - works great on mobile too

But that boring web app doesn't even have pretty fonts.

It even has a "next" button, so you can see more than 30 posts, who needs that?

It shows the point count in a smaller greyer font, instead of a big circle, so I can't instinctively choose posts by popularity instead of their headlines.

It doesn't even pull up a random image from the article that might not have anything to do with the actual topic, and display it along with a preview of text, so I can't get distracted and pulled by fundamentally more attractive colorful pictures instead of boring text topics.

It's not written in the newest JavaScript framework, it's just plain old HTML, some simple CSS and Racket making it all run. Racket! That doesn't even have "JS" in its name. What is this, 2013?

Whoever wrote that version clearly doesn't know how Hacker News is meant to be viewed.

ahem

But seriously, the Hacker News site is one of my favorite "news" sites. Simple, clean, no distractions, just headlines.

Also, some of the websites listed in the article are quite useful, like the search engine. Most of the others are simply different ways of reading Hacker News, not "better". Might be better for some people. Not for me.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#24

Ok, so all of those are for reading, but I don't see any that would allow voting and commenting on HN. It's also the case with pretty much all other HN apps/interfaces I've seen (with notable exception of HN Enhancement Suite, which is a browser extension). I don't understand why that is. Is there some important rule of HN that disallows any third-party interaction except through the official interface? Or do people…

There is no proper API, IIRC. All those clients scrape the website.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#25

Ok, so all of those are for reading, but I don't see any that would allow voting and commenting on HN. It's also the case with pretty much all other HN apps/interfaces I've seen (with notable exception of HN Enhancement Suite, which is a browser extension). I don't understand why that is. Is there some important rule of HN that disallows any third-party interaction except through the official interface? Or do people…

There is no proper API, IIRC. All those clients scrape the website.

There is (or at least was) an API, AFAIK read-only though. I still don't see why one couldn't combine the API and scrapping to get a full read/write interface going.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#26
I want one with a big hide button for posts/comments and anonymous comments.

I don't need to vote or something, I just want to get rid of uninteresting stuff as fast as easy as possible.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#28

just use https://news.ycombinator.com - works great on mobile too

But that boring web app doesn't even have pretty fonts. It even has a "next" button, so you can see more than 30 posts, who needs that? It shows the point count in a smaller greyer font, instead of a big circle, so I can't instinctively choose posts by popularity instead of their headlines. It doesn't even pull up a random image from the article that might not have anything to do with the actual topic, and display it…

I like it. The code blocks on mobile are terrible (totally unusable) and the up/down vote buttons could be a bit bigger, but overall it's pretty good.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#29

Ok, so all of those are for reading, but I don't see any that would allow voting and commenting on HN. It's also the case with pretty much all other HN apps/interfaces I've seen (with notable exception of HN Enhancement Suite, which is a browser extension). I don't understand why that is. Is there some important rule of HN that disallows any third-party interaction except through the official interface? Or do people…

I use Materialistic (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidr...). I can read comment vote, although down voting is not available.
Post reply on HN