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Other ways to read Hacker News

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151–160 of 191 posts

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#151
post #143
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with you, reading comments is an awful experience on both desktop and mobile. Their addition of the [-] eases the pain but it is still painful to click on it on mobile, and it still on the freaking right of every comments instead of being on the left. I know have two [-] [-] on both side of each comments because I use a firefox plugin to have one in the right place.

Why is it so awful? Collapsing, threaded comments seem to be a great way to organize organic discussions. How would you do it differently? 'Awful' implies that it is very far from your preferred format.

They don’t complain about threading, they complain about the UX of collapsing threads. On mobile, the hit target is too small (a minus sign) to hit reliably with a single quick tap.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#152
post #79

I had no idea there were people that needed to view HN differently - let alone 21+ ways. I find the "native" presentation basically perfect for both desktop and mobile browsing.

IMHO, HN is HN (deeply loved and mostly used) because of its minimalism and saying No to almost everything a modern web designer would think of in their user stories - except performance.

It's insanely fast loading. Just text. Pure text. Sometimes on desktop I replace the yellow background with white (css hack) otherwise my colleagues ask me what am I looking at yellow all day.

Maybe a sort by most voted, most discussed and most recent would help but again not sure, sometimes playing by whatever available and randomness adds a greater flavour than controlling everything.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#153
I'd like to see categories, and being able to subscribe to them.

Alternatively, what I'd like to filter out of HN:

- People pushing their products

- Useless artistic projects

- CSS hacks

- Ways to make money without much effort

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#154
I find the original HN site easy enough to read, as long as I have the following Greasemonkey script active:

// ==UserScript== // @name Hacker News Readability (small width) // @description Reduces the width on Hacker News to make it easier to read // @include http://news.ycombinator.com/* // @include https://news.ycombinator.com/* // @grant none // ==/UserScript==

GM_addStyle(".default { width: 650px !important; }");

Having the width reduced makes reading much quicker, since you don't have to scan such a long line of text. I would encourage everyone to try it.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

aannnnd that is about all, which is kind of amazing really.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#157
post #75
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for anyone else, but if it were me, I wouldn't expect anyone to trust me enough to use it, so why bother?

People likely would use it. It's a HN account, not a bank account.

Yes, but they shouldn't.

Even though I have no ill intent and it's just an account on a silly web forum, they shouldn't and it would make me sad if they did.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#158
post #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.

There are anonymous comments?

"anonymous" meaning posting through an alt account.

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#159

For me the native version is stunningly good. Both on desktop and mobile devices. It loads tremendously fast, has the correct font types and no smuck. The only sidestep I sometimes make is to Boreal[1][2] as a native ios app. It has a more convenient way if reading the comments. Double tap a comment to collapse instead of hit the little minus sign. Especially as I read with only my left hand and minus sign is on the…

It loads fast and doesn't use web fonts, but that's not really a high bar, for essentially a forum.

Apart from that it's not exactly a pleasant reading experience.

Tiny text for modern displays. Poor typography (bad line-height of content, needlessly cramped padding in listing). Ugly beige background colour, randomly constrained to a container, (why not be all-white or all-beige). Poor click targets for smaller displays.

On desktop, I use the Georgify [1] Chrome extension, fixes my (desktop-related) complaints above whilst staying minimal. For mobile I use the Premii iOS app (it also has web and android versions) [2]. Well designed, lots of nice features like the comment collapsing you mention.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfale...

[2] https://github.com/premii/hn

Re: Other ways to read Hacker News

#160
post #91

These things come and go, the annoying part is verifying they are still maintained. I recently collected this list along with the best discussion, typically from their launch: http://hackernewsgrid.com | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078605 (2017) https://www.taggernews.com | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337275 (2017) https://vue-hn.now.sh & https://hnews.xyz | https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hnews.x…

I've been using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidroh.materialistic For my day to day browsing. It has a pretty fully fledged feature set, including saving stories for later, and some neat aggregates (top last 24 hours is labelled "catch up" or something similar).

Yes I really like Materialistic too. Using it now, in fact.
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