Show HN: HackerDaily – What if HN updates only once a day?

by RubenvanE • 6 years ago

90 47 6 years ago

icy• 6 years ago

This is fantastic! Love the choice of colors and fonts. It just might replace HN for me -- at least on my phone. The urge to refresh the frontpage is hard to control. I can see this helping.

edit: Just noticed the incredibly nifty comment collapsing buttons. Very intuitive.

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Thank you! This was exactly my intention when I created it. :)

manojlds• 6 years ago

Isn't that what this is - https://news.ycombinator.com/front

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Yes, it is based on /front, but it uses your local time to set the days, instead of UTC. The problem with /front is that the front page is always only 1 click away.

I also created it to use (in my opinion) a better UI and UX, to add a dark mode, and to make it a PWA.

pc86• 6 years ago

The design is honestly fantastic. Great work.

How do you enable dark mode?

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Hi everyone!

I love Hacker News, the problem is that, like all social platforms, it easily becomes a slot machine. Every time you look there is a new post or comment!

HackerDaily is built to alleviate this problem as well as a few others:

- The posts are grouped per day, starting from yesterday. So you never miss the best posts

- It has an improved collapsing comment system

- It’s a PWA, so you can install it to your homescreen and use it as an app

- It has a dark mode

- It's open source[1]

I would love to hear what you think about it!

[1] https://hackerdaily.io/opensource

ta8645• 6 years ago

I feel a bit dumb having to ask this, but how do you turn on the dark mode?

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Not a dumb question at all!

To keep the site as lightweight as possible, I only use CSS to enable dakr mode. This is done by using prefers-color-scheme.[1] So you can only enable dark mode by enabling it either on your computer/phone on in your browser.

Please let me know if you've any more questions! :)

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

bthallplz• 6 years ago

Could you please add a link to click through to the HN page for the submissions (and comments?)? I like to favorite posts on HN, so I need to click through and favorite them here.

ksrm• 6 years ago

The number shown when collapsing a thread ("x more") appears to be incorrect.

samoa42• 6 years ago

also http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

henlo• 6 years ago

It's hard to read. Maybe because the dark background is too light? Or maybe the typeface? I can't read each list with focus, because the next or previous list is grabbing my attention too. Let's say I read list number 2 title, my eyes simply jump up and down reading number 1 and 3. Have you consider to darken the background?

Anyway, nice design!

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Thank you for your honest feedback!

I quickly added a page with a darker background[1], is this more readable? If not I might need to increase the spacing between the items.

[1] https://hackerdaily.io/darker

takd2• 6 years ago

I really like the idea, and the site is pretty. Is there a daily RSS feed too? I cannot find it.

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Thank you!

I am currently looking into how to generate an RSS feed. I personally don't use RSS, so I am not sure how you would like to have it be implemented, I have two questions:

1. Do you want all articles on HackerDaily added to your RSS feed? (HackerDaily only shows the articles with 100+ points, so that's about 30-50 articles per day)

2. HackerDaily uses your local timezone to find the articles per day, would you like to have this for the RSS feed as well, or is based on UTC also okay?

karmakaze• 6 years ago

Ah ok I was wondering about which stories showed up. Nice work, like the day of the week selections--thought of maybe having today on the far right.

I also made an attempt (with far less style) to reduce my dopamine driven visits by showing top stories only for today so the second visit looks almost identical to the first with 'not much new' to see, then move on. Popular keywords are grouped at the bottom to help surface the rare interesting cuts.

takd2• 6 years ago

1. Yes, I think all HackerDaily articles should be included. 30-50 articles per day is not that much.

2. I think separate RSS feeds for different timezones might be better (not _every_ timezone, but say, every whole hour offset), so everyone can choose what they want; either based on the timezone or on their daily routine.

raman162• 6 years ago

Nice, I'm a big fan of this. This certainly is for the ones who just want to lurk the best posts and not get caught up on the "what's hot now" every hour.

someperson3• 6 years ago

Very useful, nice work.

I find your HackerDaily comment section much more difficult to read compared to standard HN. I think it's because Hacker News indentation is larger (with upvote/downvote arrows), and standard HN uses almost the entire width of my 4K display (which makes almost every comment only 1 or 2 lines long), compared to your website which has a narrow column so wraps each comment into many paragraphs (which makes it harder to view the comment tree in a compact way).

I'm sure other users prefer the narrow column view, so take my feedback with a grain of salt.

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Thanks for your feedback!

I indeed designed HackerDaily explicitly with smaller columns in mind. The reason for this is that it makes reading longer comments a lot easier. There has been quite a bit of research done to figure out what the optimal line length is and most sources come down to about 60-80 characters. With 80-90 characters on HackerDaily its already on the outer edge of the readability spectrum.

[1] https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

nicoburns• 6 years ago

I think there's a bit of a trade-off here. Shorter lines are indeed easier to read. But they are harder to not read (i.e. if you want to skim over content to find interesting ones). The official HN site makes it really easy to skim down to find the next top-level thread for example.

There's the same trade-off with code line length. Shorter lines are easier to read, but they make understanding the overall structure of the file much more difficult.

rileymat2• 6 years ago

I was thinking of mentioning the same thing. For me I think it is that the internal paragraphs are about the same size as the breaks between comments. Also I like the way that the Original Hacker News uses grey for the user name and dark for the comment, that provides more differentiation between comments. Also, using bold for user names attracts my attention to the least important part.

To give a positive comment, long comments are easier to read on this version.

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Thanks for the great feedback!

I just deployed a version with reduced margins between paragraphs in a comment and I'm gonna look into how to improve the comment metadata in a less obtrusive way.

varbhat• 6 years ago

How is this different from https://news.ycombinator.com/front ?

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Yes, it is based on /front, but it uses your local time to set the days, instead of UTC. The problem with /front is that the front page is always only 1 click away. I also created it to use (in my opinion) a better UI and UX, to add a dark mode, and to make it a PWA.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25568695

blackbrokkoli• 6 years ago

Very cool!

Small Feedback: The "Show HN" tag does stand out a lot - giving it the vibe of something like a site administration announcement or an error message. Maybe you could consider toning it down a bit?

Otherwise, great work. Let's see if I can replace normal HN :)

rmm• 6 years ago

Is it possible to open links in safari or share them via the pwa? I use send to Firefox quite a bit on my phone

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

If you open a webpage you can share them via all the Safari sharing methods.

catwind7• 6 years ago

Looks great! :thumbsup:

timqian• 6 years ago

Nice work~ I have built a similar service using GitHub action & issues. https://github.com/headllines/hackernews-daily/issues It creates an issue every day with top posts in it so that users can subscribe it by watching the repo or RSS

guiambros• 6 years ago

Thank you for your work on hackernews-daily on Github. I've been using for a couple of months now and love it.

Receiving the updates via email helps to throttle back the urge to hit the front page every now and then.

wtmt2• 6 years ago

This site has been quite pleasant to use and read through. I especially liked the easy collapsibility of comment threads and the indication of the comment level.

While I haven’t used the site much, it seemed as if one could only navigate by day for the last one week. Is it possible to enter or choose a date and go to that date in the (probably distant) past? If yes, I haven’t discovered it. I don’t have time to catch up with some posts and threads within a week, and would like to use this interface if possible. I get that it may add to your storage and server costs to keep a longer term archive.

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Great point! Let me see if I can quickly add this.

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Ok, I added a quick shortcut. You can now go to a specific date by just going to that page, for example, the page for exactly a month ago is https://hackerdaily.io/2020-11-29. My database goes back to roughly the start of October, so that's the furthest you can go back for now.

I haven't add anything to the UI for now. Do you have an idea how to add this nicely to the existing UI?

wtmt2• 6 years ago

Thanks for the prompt response. I get a “404 This page could not be found” error page when I visit that link or any other URL I type manually with the date in the last one month.

As a start, I think adding a “Choose Date” link and providing a date picker to navigate to a specific day may be nice.

max_• 6 years ago

This is difficult to not like.

Nice color scheme!

orf• 6 years ago

This is fantastic, and it’s the first PWA that I’ve felt the need to install.

Really nice work.

I would only add that the comments are way too big to be usable. I’d take a look at the Octal IOS app for an example of doing hacker news comments “right” in terms of size and display.

adkadskhj3• 6 years ago

Love it! I've been wanting to write a reader that RSS-like ingests things and gives me a throttled digest - to reduce the frequency of the slot pulling behavior.

The problem i've been struggling with is how i properly summarize. The slot behavior is useful because slot-wins have material impact of finding content i do, actually, want to consume. Reducing the slot-pulls to once a day puts more weight on something else doing the filtering. Meaning i fear missing things i care about.

I wonder if there's some type of non-ML pattern seeking implementation that will let you refine your filter to improve signal:noise. I say non-ML because i'm interested in non-trained, smaller locally hosted datasets.

Anyway, i digress. This is cool! I think i'll let this thing be my slot-machine for the next few days and see if i feel like i'm missing anything. Appreciate it!

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

It is indeed a hard problem. For Hacker News I've made the assumption that I can trust the HN community to find the best posts, so they're the filter. I only sort on the score of all posts in a single day and show the posts with a score of 100+.

Most posts with 100+ points are at least somewhat interesting and I only have to do the manual filtering to find the few posts I want to read once a day.

adkadskhj3• 6 years ago

One request: AskHN/ShowHN included as well.

I know it increases the content and thus the slot-machine surface area, but Show/Ask represent a good portion of my desire to come HN at all. There are many super interesting posts that never make it to the front page.

RubenvanE15• 6 years ago

Do you mean a page to show all AskHN/ShowHN posts? Because it already shows all the posts (including AskHN/ShowHN) with more than 100 points.

adkadskhj3• 6 years ago

Correct. But my request is rooted in the fact that AskHN/ShowHN are often more niche questions/show posts. The signal:noise ratio for them is, imo, different than that of popular posts on the front page. Therefor i'm describing that they should not be required to be front-page-popular to be browse-able.

Another way to think about it is i often want to see discussions and projects from HN folks. The frontpage can often just be full of popular nonsense - Reddit-esque. However ShowHN and AskHN often have gems that are obscure, with a much smaller amount of points.

Yet another way to look at it is: i'd love a toggle filter to only show me AskHN/ShowHN on the front page. However most days it would only be one or two posts.

Hopefully this illustrates my desires :)

(one final example, hah, might be this very post. I suspect it'll get over 100, but currently it's sitting at 60 pts)

perdid0• 6 years ago

Awesome site, thanks for it! I am going to switch to it! One request: on mobile, when going back to HackerDaily from clicking a link, it loads the HackerDaily page at the top, so that I have to scroll back down to where I was. Minor inconvenience, but compare it to HN where I browse back, and HN loads right where I was. Again, thanks for this!

Show HN: HackerDaily – What if HN updates only once a day?

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