Hckr news – Hacker News sorted by time

This is the same content but with a better and responsive design. And by that I don't just mean how it looks but the core functionality of the site. How it looks is actually pretty minimalistic and clean.

Finding stuff back on HN is tricky because the page changes all the time and the items re-order and disappear. This gets rid of that by sorting by time. And then you can narrow it down with top 10% and top 50%. So simple and effective. I loved Twitter and Facebook a lot more before they decided to be "clever" and hired a lot of machine learning propeller heads that completely ruined the experience by trying to second guess what I should be seeing and not seeing (which mostly serves their needs rather than mine).

HN of course has a much more simplistic algorithm of some formula involving time, upvotes, and number of comments. It works in combination with the old school paged list of stuff where the page size was set in stone to 30. It creates a sense of urgency for people to get their link on the front page. It's prime real-estate and it replaced slashdot in that sense.

This seems to keep the best parts of that by simply sorting by time and getting rid of the 30 items per page thing with a more modern design. You can simply scroll back as far as you want and still benefit from the "frontpage" notion by filtering.

I’d been gradually customizing it on my phone by using an inspector extension and a custom CSS extension. Recently another poster shared a more thorough stylesheet, so I switched to that. It wasn’t entirely my preference but it’s close enough that I was satisfied to stop trying to customize someone else’s website on my phone.

Well, since then one thing after another has started getting smaller and closer together again, presumably as selectors change for other purposes.

I’ve previously built a dark mode extension that I won’t link because it’s also broken now. I’d love to actually contribute mobile friendly styles that people could opt into. But as far as I can tell HN is intended to be used by people with perfect eyesight and perfect hand eye coordination with a mouse on a good desk surface and a large screen.

For some reason, I’ve found that I still miss some interesting posts with hckrnews. Maybe it’s because those posts have been pushed down in ranking over the hours I’m not checking or because I’m not using the available filters. So I still go to HN directly sometimes.