Show HN: A clean alternative Hacker News interface

Each page makes a request that returns a list of IDs which appears to then be used to make individual requests for each news story. So each pageload makes dozens of requests. Couldn't that information just be provided in the first request?

Also, the layout is a little too minimal. It's harder to scan headlines than it is on Hacker News. Even just a small amount of spacing between the items would work wonders here.

Overall, I'm not totally sold on this being a clean alternative to Hacker News (which is tough to beat since you really can't get much cleaner than HN to begin with), but I think you could significantly improve the experience without having to change too much.

Re: Show HN: A clean alternative Hacker News interface

#5

Post by ICodeSometimes » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 5:12 AM UTC

I can see the inspiration here but the execution could be more refined i think. Great job putting something into the wild though!

Re: Show HN: A clean alternative Hacker News interface

#6

Post by timoteostewart » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 5:17 AM UTC

Nice job, Tuan! Having written an HN interface myself, my hat off to you for seeing it through and sharing it.

Building on Minor49er's comment about requests, a nice feature in your next iteration of Lipu might be to cache some or all of the details of the submission on your server side. Three benefits from doing that are: (1) you can choose how often you query firebaseio for fresh data to avoid hammering their server, (2) your UX latency isn't so dependent on network traffic, and (3) you can reuse the submission details (i.e., provide a speedy response to user) when the user switches from one category (e.g., top, new, ask, show) to another and the same story happens to be present in both categories.

For other HN readers, Tuan has a brief dev blog of sorts about developing Lipu: https://tsk.bearblog.dev/journal-lipu/ . (Not too bad for a 14-year-old!)

Re: Show HN: A clean alternative Hacker News interface

#7

Post by sundarurfriend » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

Just a blank page when Javascript is disabled. Which is fine (though a small noscript message would make things clearer), just letting you know in case it's a use case you just didn't consider, rather than decide not to support.

Re: Show HN: A clean alternative Hacker News interface

#8

Post by unnouinceput » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 5:44 AM UTC

Nope, not even close. Lipu takes 3 seconds to load all threads, while HN original is instant. Plus that white it burns. I like light themes instead of dark, but not pure white. HN's light grey is perfect.

Re: Show HN: A clean alternative Hacker News interface

#9

Post by brailsafe » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 5:47 AM UTC

Hacker News may not be very pretty, but it gets a lot of things right typographically, by not trying very hard. I think this might be a good opportunity to play around with learning to improve your layout and type skills a bit.

In particular, I don't think that slab serif typeface with dangling descenders is a good choice for what is a list of a few closely grouped lines of text, as opposed to something like the paragraph typeface HN uses for the body of comments. Likewise, those grouped lines of text need much more room to breath. It's amazing how much work or experience it can take to make a even a link list readable and usable.

Re: Show HN: A clean alternative Hacker News interface

#10

Post by scim-knox-twox » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 5:47 AM UTC

unnouinceput wrote: post #8

Nope, not even close. Lipu takes 3 seconds to load all threads, while HN original is instant. Plus that white it burns. I like light themes instead of dark, but not pure white. HN's light grey is perfect.

And Lipu doesn't work without JS...