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Show HN: I made yet another UI to browse HN

hn.sayan.page

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Show HN: I made yet another UI to browse HN

#1
Primarily built this to learn how NextJS works and also a bit about Tailwind CSS. Also has request caching using the WebCache API + expiration which is quite a hacky implementation.

Let me know what you think!

Source is at https://github.com/say4n/hn, pull requests welcome!

Show HN: I made yet another UI to browse HN
hn.sayan.page

Re: Show HN: I made yet another UI to browse HN

#5

HACK (with the green-ish computer chip icon) is also amazing if you want something to "have"

I wish for a combo of HACK and Octal. I like the UI of Octal more but it doesn’t support notifications nor does it show your comment karma (which isn’t a big deal but it’s a little annoying).

Also Octal has some weird bugs like not removing the downvote button after 24 hours so you just get an odd error when you click it. And the thing that bugs me the most where if you swipe back then change your mind you can’t swipe forward to go back to the comment thread you were on (a la Apollo, RIP). What makes it worse is swiping “forward” changes the “tab” you are on losing your scroll place in the list of HN posts. My muscle memory will never stop doing this though.

Re: Show HN: I made yet another UI to browse HN

#6

HACK (with the green-ish computer chip icon) is also amazing if you want something to "have"

I wish for a combo of HACK and Octal. I like the UI of Octal more but it doesn’t support notifications nor does it show your comment karma (which isn’t a big deal but it’s a little annoying). Also Octal has some weird bugs like not removing the downvote button after 24 hours so you just get an odd error when you click it. And the thing that bugs me the most where if you swipe back then change your mind you can’t swip…

See I love HACK's UI the most although I agree (if memory is correct that didnt mind or was even nominally impressed on that front) and the dev is super nice and responsive.

Re: Show HN: I made yet another UI to browse HN

#8
The hardest part for me when building a HN reader was getting each article metadata to render the meta image / descriptions. I know the main site doesn’t do this, but my favorite iOS hn reader app (Octal) does this so I’m used to it and quite like it.

I wanted to do it all locally / serverless but I struggled to find a good client friendly library for parsing meta tags that was 0 deps and typed so I wound up making a cloudflare worker to bypass cors and manually streamed the html to extract and parse the head element with a bit of regex and elbow grease.

It worked out, but I wish the HN api would cache and provide that stuff once to save the authors from the extra load of all the clients like mine that need to make extra requests to each articles home page.

Re: Show HN: I made yet another UI to browse HN

#10

HACK (with the green-ish computer chip icon) is also amazing if you want something to "have"

I wish for a combo of HACK and Octal. I like the UI of Octal more but it doesn’t support notifications nor does it show your comment karma (which isn’t a big deal but it’s a little annoying). Also Octal has some weird bugs like not removing the downvote button after 24 hours so you just get an odd error when you click it. And the thing that bugs me the most where if you swipe back then change your mind you can’t swip…

My issues with Octal are that it doesn’t show my reply immediately after posting and worse: it always throws an error when I edit my replies even though the edit worked in the background. It also collapses double spacing on edit sometimes.

It’s a pretty bad app unless you’re just reading. I assume the developer never touched it again after deploying it which wouldn’t be an issue if you didn’t have to pay to unlock comment writing (its worst implemented feature).

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