Show HN: Read Hacker News Like Pinterest – Built with Vuejs

The thumbnails are generated using phantomjs server. I'm using https://github.com/blockai/phantom-pool to make sure the phantomjs instance is reused. Also I'm using a scheduling node package (https://github.com/Automattic/kue) to make sure that images are precached as the link are submited to hackernews.

I'll post the code on https://github.com/valentinvieriu/vue-hackernews-2.0, but need to take care of some hardcoded redis credentials first. I'll give a reply when it's up

Fenaek2• 10 years ago

Hi, I sent you a DM on twitter @rreyes1979

tag2• 10 years ago

I really like the concept. Great work! The auto refresh is slightly annoying for me personally but I could live with it :)

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Agree with this, the first version had no autorefresh. But this is quite annoying if you have this open in a tab. You get old news, and that kind of is against the purpose of the app.

duncanawoods5• 10 years ago

I guess there are two types of users - constant checkers might like auto-refresh but if you check less frequently then you want to scroll deep and for us, auto-refresh is a usability nightmare.

cyberferret• 10 years ago

I agree. Love the layout and the fact I can get more of an idea what the thread is about, but the constant auto refreshing, as well as the refreshing while scrolling threw me a little bit.

I tend to skim a bunch of articles, and make a mental note of the position of interesting ones to go back to later, but when I scroll up, everything is in a different location, breaking the mental map that I had built.

Other than that, I think it is a great alternative. Good work.

nkrisc• 10 years ago

It is massively annoying and a huge UX misstep. It just happened to me: I hovered over a story I was interested and could feel the muscles in my hand tensing as I was about to click when suddenly the stories refreshed and I lost the one I was interested in. It made me somewhat irrationally angry, like something was stolen from me.

Do not automatically change content that requires people to read

ElCapitanMarkla• 10 years ago

Hey this is really cool, nice work

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Thank you. Hope you will use this on a daily basis

sarreph• 10 years ago

The visual aspect is really nice, and a welcoming change.

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Glad you liked it!

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Hi, I'm the author of this project. The code will be available soon on github: at https://github.com/valentinvieriu/visual-hacker-news - right now that's the old version using Angularjs

The project uses as a starting point the amazing Vuejs Implementation from https://github.com/vuejs/vue-hackernews-2.0 . It has super fast server side rendering, that's why the feedback is imediate as you load the page.

The thumbnails are generated using phantomjs server. I'm using https://github.com/blockai/phantom-pool to make sure the phantomjs instance is reused. This improves the speed of the screenshots quite well. Also I'm using a scheduling node package (https://github.com/Automattic/kue) to make sure that images are pre cached as the link are submited to hackernews.

I'll post the code on https://github.com/valentinvieriu/vue-hackernews-2.0, but need to take care of some hardcoded redis credentials first. I'll give a reply when it's up

Thank you for the interest! I'll do my best to reply to all questions if there is interest on this project.

Dowwie2• 10 years ago

I'm finding it hard to read the title of the tiles because of the opacity of the background. I don't need such a large thumbnail, nor one that is so legible.

How did you like working with Vue? Did you have javascript framework experience prior to using it?

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Design can be changed. Can you tell me what would be a right proportion for you? Wider screenshot ( so higher resolution so you get more context of the page ) but less height? Actually on a retina ipad, the text is quite readable

cvrajeesh2• 10 years ago

May be you should consider rejecting random urls from your thumbnail generation endpoint. Now I could generate thumbnail of any website e.g. my blog https://hnews.xyz/thumbnail/?url=http://rajeeshcv.com

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

It's a hard one to do.I agree you can do that now. I'm thinking on a solution, but it's not really easy. Right now I have no solution.

Xcelerate• 10 years ago

My suggestion would be to wait a second or two for the pages to load before taking a screenshot of them. It seems that for some websites, there is dynamic loading or an animation first, and this shows up on your board as uninformative pictures.

Great job on the site though! It's very smooth.

clbrook• 10 years ago

Take this as a personal opinion, but I felt like I was having to work to find the titles...maybe they'd do better on top? Is that something that could be easily A/B tested?

Fuzzwah• 10 years ago

I had the same thought.

maximl3372• 10 years ago

What do you mean by - It has super fast server side rendering, that's why the feedback is imediate as you load the page?

How is this different from a normal VueJS app where I would fetch data with ajax or vue-resource and then fill the elements with content?

maximl3372• 10 years ago

Found it: https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/ssr.html

robodale• 10 years ago

Hello - excellent work. I'm working on a Vue-based UI myself and really like your use of infinite scrolling + performant rendering. Great Job!

roryisok• 10 years ago

hah, I literally had this exact idea this morning - I was even going to use vue.js! there goes my january project =/

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

you can contribute back to this project. Will be on github https://github.com/valentinvieriu/visual-hacker-news

duncanawoods5• 10 years ago

Wow - it actually made "new" look interesting to me. When I look at "new" on classic HN, the "0 point 0 comments" and expectation of low quality means I rarely click anything. This drew me into interesting articles I would not otherwise read. Great - very valuable!

The title is nearly always visible on the rendered page. The overlayed title adds a lot of extra noise that is spoiling the browsing experience for me. Can you make it optional or on-hover please? I also don't want points/comment prejudicing my judgement of whether a story is worth reading. I feel the unique value this brings for "new" is to get you closer to the content "pre-click" and help you evaluate a page/story on its own merits. I still prefer classic HN for "top" where I'm interested in the discussion more than the stories.

The relayout mid-scroll was really annoying. I have a refresh button, let me control it please!

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Thank you for the feedback. Noted down the feedback. I agree with you regarding the extra information. I will probably make it on hover. The title might be necessary, because it's not always visible in the screenshot. Regarding the refresh topic i want to have it for the people that want to keep the tab open, and always get the new news, but would be a good idea to have it optional.

If you wan to contribute, you can use the https://github.com/valentinvieriu/visual-hacker-news ( still old version there )

Thank you

duncanawoods5• 10 years ago

The title might be necessary, because it's not always visible in the screenshot.

That was my first assumption but I am now tempted to say you should fully invest in your concept. Drive a complete behaviour change from choosing stories based on the title to choosing stories based on the actual content, its design and being able to skim the first few paragraphs which lets you judge writing quality and intent more than a title.

If the title isn't visible on the page, so what? It clearly wasn't important to the designer. The focus on titles is perhaps a weakness of HN, not a strength. This means you should be delighted to get rid of the title and anything else that becomes an obstruction to skimming real content presented as the designer intended.

vitomd• 10 years ago

Nice work. I had a similar idea, but to show just the first comment of each post, probably in the same index page or when hovering the link. I find it useful to read the first comment when the title is not very descriptive.

Probably using Riot.js , or just a bookmarklet with javascript

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Thank you. Comments are available if you want. Just click the comments link

raffandi• 10 years ago

Wow, this is nice, giving a different view to HN.

Perhaps 3 columns on larger viewport?

Good work!

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

it is responsive. IF it does not fit your screen try pressing [ ctr + - ]/[ mac + - ] one or two times. I don't want to rescale images, because on such long list have an impact on scrolling. That's why I've decided not to allow them to rescale.

chpmrc• 10 years ago

Hi, great idea! I was wondering if you have plans to save the scroll position when transitioning back from an article's comments. It can definitely become my default HN client.

Edit: oh never mind, it's working now. Weird.

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Hehe.The bug is only for the first time. I cannot figure out why. When you are doing this second time, keeps the scroll. Actually was not a trivial issue. It's quite a hard on to do on a infinite scroll page.

wdroz• 10 years ago

When you see this post from your website, it's not recursive. Why ?

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Haha, yes I was expecting that also, but unfortunately the PhantomJS server failed to render the page correctly. ( I'm using Flexbox - and that's why)

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Try Refreshing NOW! :)

imakesoft• 10 years ago

Sweet! I just think it's too hectic. It refreshes the view too often and I lose my focus.

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Thank you for the feedback. Was mentioned several times. Will be addressed in a future release. Probably a flag in the settings.

cpcallen• 10 years ago

Cute - but totally the opposite of what I want. Can you make a site that makes Pinterest (and Facebook!) look like HN, reducing each post to a clear, informative headline, so I can quickly scan 25+ posts without having to scroll, and click through to the ones I'm actually interested in?

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Try the original version (https://vue-hn.now.sh/ ) ;)

bsirkia• 10 years ago

Love original version! Only thing stopping me from making it my regular client is the lack of "best" menu item. I love checking out day's best or week's best if I've been to busy to keep up. Great work though.

matt4077• 10 years ago

Here's Pinterest without the pictures https://about:blank.

thehooplehead• 10 years ago

Agreed. I think HN is the kind of forum where a picture isn't quite worth a thousand words. With these types of articles, I'd be more interested in bulleted summaries than thumbnails. I appreciate HN for being information-dense/text-heavy.

thecupisblue• 10 years ago

Looks cool and works way better than Pinterest

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Thank you.

kristiandupont• 10 years ago

This is very nice. Seems more suited for Reddit, or perhaps subreddits like the many picture-centric subreddits (personal favourite: /r/outrun)

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Actually I was thinking on building similar projects for other websites. I think it helps a lot previewing what the landing page is about. I will look into reddit api, when I'll have the time

pjc50• 10 years ago

Missing the authentic Pinterest experience of giant modals popping up as soon as you scroll down, trying to force you to log in.

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Good one! I can add them if people request them, but i doubt :)

richardboegli2• 10 years ago

AWESOME work. Very impressed!

burnt1ce• 10 years ago

Ditto.. good job!

nedsma• 10 years ago

Nice concept.

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Thank you

AndrewVos• 10 years ago

This is really nice, well done! One suggestion I might add is that you remove the hover effect from the image. It feels a bit inconsistent maybe?

Also not 100% sure about the infinite scrolling. I spend a lot of time on half-working internet and have to refresh the page a lot. Also it means that when scrolling there's a lot of items jumping around on the page, which means you lose your place quite easily.

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

The jumping around will be addressed. See one of the suggestions in the comments. Regarding infinite scrolling, I have a personal preference for this type of navigation. I consume those on my tablet, and feels natural just to scroll. Thank you for the feedback.

component• 10 years ago

Adding on the issue of refresh; I usually access HN on my iPhone - currently every back action triggers a _refresh_. A great example of back action handing is Reddit's mobile page.

Other than that the whole thing looks really neat.

htaunay• 10 years ago

Congrats, great concept and delivery!

As feedback, I'm noticing that some thumbnails for specific types of urls (e.g. PDF's and Ask HN) aren't being generated correctly, and just get a solid color. Maybe a static icon representing the type of a particular url (e.g. https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.Ma1c43eb41218e48366a5dc8a...) would be better to look at?

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

Yes, thank you. The pdfs are hard to screenshot. They can consume a lot of memory on load. It's planned to have an icon or something. Right now they are ignored. Thank you for the suggestion

ndirish1842• 10 years ago

Awesome idea/execution.

One issue with HN that I constantly run into is that I might miss an interesting article because each submission (30 on each page) look so similar. Your approach (where at most 4 articles appear within my browser at once) allows me to take more time to consider whether I should read each article.

Well done!!

koolba• 10 years ago

The is cool yet also makes me feel like the hours I spend staring at HN are just as dumb as hours spent staring at designer bags on Pinterest. Having HN appear as a wall of text just hides it really well.

donmatito• 10 years ago

Very good idea and execution. It is nice to be able to compare the power image-based design versus the simplicity of the text-based design

blcArmadillo• 10 years ago

You're missing the giant login modal that prevents you from using the site ;)

tedmiston2• 10 years ago

This is pretty cool. The realtime refresh is a nice touch.

It would be helpful to link back to the stories on HN so one can comment.

Added to my list of HN clients: https://pinboard.in/u:tedmiston/t:hacker-news/

danenania• 10 years ago

This is really nice.

A minor suggestion: I think you might as well thumbnail Ask HN/Tell HN/any other pure text posts too. This would look better than the big blank squares for those, and work well as a preview.

jw989• 10 years ago

I agree with this. Other than this it's a great project, nice work!

ezekg• 10 years ago

Am I the only one getting a 503 response on all of the assets?

fokinsean• 10 years ago

I am too.

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

I guess that the server went to sleep for a while. It runs on a free heroku tier. I'm planning on moving it on Digital Ocean, but waiting for things to cool down a little :)

brilliantcode2• 10 years ago

The more I am studying React + Redux, the more it becomes apparent to me that it's over engineered for an individual and even a small team. It feels like the Java Swing days where verbosity and architectural opinion dominates all in the name of cross-platformity.

Another minus is that you no longer use the existing conventions that stood the test of time, HTML and CSS. It's now JSX and you have to write boilerplate JS code just to show a simple hello world example. On top of that it poses barriers for designers who only had to worry about how the HTML/CSS looks, now additional work has to go into splitting everything into myriad logical pieces which really have no impact on the overall productivity or quality. And that's only for the React view side, the real beast is Redux. That simple grid table you could get away with using jqGrid is now a 10 week job involving multiple engineers.

I'm curious to know if anyone found any enlightment working with Vue.js and whether something like Redux makes sense to hold states of the app or if they got away with it.

joeyprr• 10 years ago

You want enlightenment? Ignore the frameworks/JS hype.

"It's now JSX and you have to write boilerplate JS code just to show a simple hello world example."

This is absolute insanity. It's time for a re-discovery of “vanilla” HTML, CSS, with a sprinkling of "vanilla" JS from the ground up without any frameworks.

I mean.. this website doesn't even seem to work as intended: http://imgur.com/LdRFS4L

arcticfox• 10 years ago

Are you using noscript or something? it looks great for me.

duderific• 10 years ago

React/Redux solves a specific problem: managing state and DOM rendering in a complex single page app. If you don't have that specific problem, you probably shouldn't use that combination of technologies. If you do, you can use React/Redux or any of the other technologies out there (Angular, Vue etc.).

greenspot• 10 years ago

Getting into React is kind of mixed bag. The core concepts are easy to understand and compared to other frameworks lean. JSX is easy, components are trivial but once you try to get productive, wow, it's not that simple anymore. It's more than a bit of HTML embedded in JS.

So, you need really to spend time to understand the core of React very, very well. And this takes time, effort and at least a couple of real and serious apps you should write to understand why React and its concept are the next step in FE dev and why others use React's concept as blueprint (e.g. Inferno). Tutorials are not enough, real projects are the best way to grok React.

I don't think it's like Java Swing, not at all (I think the comparison is misleading since React is from the ground very different, e.g. totally different design patterns/paradigms, .g. no observer pattern, and a super minimal API). It's a tool which is super flexible. It's definitely not your daddy's jQuery-based front-end framework which let you start quickly. But once you get more experienced with React you face much better code maintainability with a small code base already. Further, you should be good at JS and ES6. I guess this might be another obstacle for many. Compared to Vue which I like a lot and which shares also some similarities, Vue is more complex due to a large API surface, code-in-HTML templating syntax, nested instance semantics, observable gotchas, ES5 workarounds and a larger documentation that is absolutely vital to read and understand.

Give React a try. You need of course a real use case. Many website's use cases don't require React and could be done with some simple server-side rendering. So, React is def not the best tool of every job.

I was ignoring React too long by just using it for some toy projects or going through tutorials. This was not enough. Once I tried React for a real project, I learned its brilliance and I don't want to go back to anything else for SPAs or websites with more interactivity.

brilliantcode2• 10 years ago

what about redux? can you do away with Redux and if so what do people use instead?

_up• 10 years ago

I have the same impression. I also tried Angular1 and found it also overly complicated. Currently I am using Teleriks Kendo UI Core (Core is Open Source) and find it a lot more intuitive. Especially the Template and Routing stuff. Also a huge Fan of their "Web Debugger" Fiddler.

kapv89• 10 years ago

Stop using redux. Try and use react independently. You'll realize redux is completely unneeded. In fact, even flux is unneeded.

enraged_camel• 10 years ago

One really nice thing about this is that the screenshots are built-in defense against the editorialization of the submission title.

harisamin• 10 years ago

Nice job! Love seeing ppl trying to build a better way to read Hacker News content. I built this to scratch my own itch http://mackernews.com I wanted a Mac HN client (you can up vote and post too :) ). I really wish HN gave us better apis to work with :(

wellwhatever• 10 years ago

this is beautiful

yumaikas• 10 years ago

Providing a link to the comments on hackernews itself would be kind of nice for being able to upvote stories and the like. There are a lot of these in the new sections that I'd like to be able to upvote/downvote without having to navigate to them in HN and such.

valentinvieriu31• 10 years ago

It is on top of my todo list. One bad thing with all those readers on top of the api, is that it makes it easy to read, but does not give the opportunity to rate and by this attacks the foundation of the quality of the articles on the list. I wish that there was a way to do SSO and then have the complete voting experience on your app. But then again, what would be the purpose of the original hacker news website then?

wilshiredetroit• 10 years ago

I'm Loving this! I had stepped away from my desk and a new set of links are there... I almost want to say its like a "Screensaver of Links"

MrAwesomeSauce• 10 years ago

This really is amazing. Probably one of the best clients that's out there at the moment. I recently built a one myself with Angular (https://github.com/hdjirdeh/angular2-hn) so I'm always amazed with all the different clients out there with their own unique twist.

I've always been interested in using Vue, how do you like the framework? Also, which Hacker News API are you using to power this? I'm on mobile so I can't see any of the requests at the moment. But since this is SSR, I probably wouldn't be able to see the API calls anyway.

ericbrow• 10 years ago

This is really awesome. This is now my default HN portal. Thank you.

Show HN: Read Hacker News Like Pinterest – Built with Vuejs

Related Stories