Show HN: hcker.news – an ergonomic, timeline-based Hacker News front page

66 comments

·May 23, 2025

Hi folks,

I've built an alternative Hacker News front page. It is inspired by and meant to be a replacement for hckrnews.com.

I built this because HN is woefully underfeatured, but most sites that try to improve it seem to assume that the visual design is the problem. hcker.news tries to maintain HN's familiarity while adding useful enhancements.

There are three primary views:

  - Timeline View: Browse top stories by votes or comments grouped by day, week, or month (e.g., top 20 per day, top 100 per week).  
  - Aggregate View: See top stories by votes or comments over custom time ranges.  
  - Front Page View: The original HN front page, untouched.

Feed Filtering:

  - Kagi Small Web: View only stories from websites that are a part of Kagi's Small Web, which is a curated list of non-commercial blogs
  - Custom Keyword Filters: Include/exclude keywords (e.g., include "Rust," exclude "DOGE") or set a minimum score threshold.
  - No HN Algorithm: Timeline and Aggregate Views show stories usually downranked by the HN algo (e.g., flagged posts or those with too many comments).

UI:

  - Unread Flags: Quickly spot new stories or ones you haven't seen.
  - Two Layouts: Classic HN style or a compact story view inspired by hckrnews.com.
  - Multi-column & High-density Modes: Fit more content on screen.
  - Themes: Light, Dark, and Manila.

I'd love your feedback and suggestions. Cheers!

Visit

jasonthorsness

One of the strengths of hacker news is how the core site hasn't really changed (no broken links on any story back to ~2007 as far as I can tell). This steadiness is a rare and valuable feature.

The fact that they do this yet also expose the data and access to enable a proliferation of cool alternatives views like this one is extremely user-friendly. Unfortunately, the rest of the internet seems to be going in a different direction and locking things down.

bobbiechen

hckrnews.com gets about 40% the traffic of news.ycombinator.com, in terms of referrers to my blog (digitalseams.com) - way more than I would have expected.

I can't even imagine another site with that much usage of alternative clients; maybe Reddit before their controversial API changes?

abnercoimbre

I'm one of those readers from hckrnews. Also thank you for your work :)

NetOpWibby

Next might be Digg. They've hired the developer of Apollo.

phatskat

Wait Digg is back and they have the Apollo dev? I left Reddit over the api mess, Apollo was the only way I liked using their service. Def gonna look into that

arvinsim

I appreciate the option to use dark mode and customize the font size.

It's just jarring though to switch the actual Hacker News comment section from the site.

koito17

Noticed the site flickers when loading. Out of curiosity, I disabled JavaScript and reloaded the site. Unfortunately, the site doesn't work at all without JavaScript, whereas the official Hacker News frontend handles this use-case well.

I understand browsing without JavaScript isn't considered a valid use-case nowadays, but it would be nice if the site performed some sort of server-side data fetching. That way users don't experience flickering. As a bonus, while waiting for JavaScript to load, users can at least see headlines (but maybe not stories; that's totally fine).

johnisgood

Probably because of the "Show" / "Hide" thing. He should just use CSS for that. You can mimick it by some CSS hack with checkboxes (that are not really checkboxes as far as the user is concerned).

You can have a modal, and multi-step CAPTCHA in CSS, so it should be relatively easy to just stick to CSS for this functionality.

postalcoder

The flicker was introduced due to a temporary banner I put in that I've since removed. Try it again, thanks for letting me know about it.

adrianwaj

I made a site called Hackerbrain a while back. #13 here: https://hackerbits.com/hacker-news/improve-hacker-news-ui/

One of the best things about it (as mentioned in article) is the ability to see the top comment on any item very quickly.

Try it here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180804173424/http://hackerbra....

Press "top" on any item. Also try the number on each.

Note how the comments can toggle open/shut and the colors.

I would definitely use that feature. :)

Also note the byline indents, curved boxes, spacing and popups on each single comment link.

coolwulf

I built a native rust based hacker news client (open source on github):

http://fastHNreader.com

And I saw this post from it :)

collinvandyck76

I'm going to check this out when I get a chance -- it would be rad if your webpage had an animated gif or video showing it working, too.

ls-a

Since no one is able to come close to HN UI/UX for many years, I wonder if HN used a UI/UX designer. If so then shout out to that designer

rob

They nailed it out of the park with the 12px default font size still in 2025. Probably the only site I have to use my browser's zoom feature on.

ls-a

To be fair i have my zoom set to 110% for all websites not just HN

consumer451

IIRC, HN is a fork of early reddit, correct?

I am curious how different the features and design were around the time of the fork.

pests

I thought Reddit was python and HN is custom written in arc?

consumer451

> Over at reddit.com, we rewrote the site from Lisp to Python in the past week.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit (2005)

That's a fun read. Hats off for Aaron.

nico

Very cool, thank you for sharing

One thing that I miss, that I use a lot on HN, is the hide feature. It helps me clear the clutter of stuff that I either already read or am not going to read

postalcoder

I can add that, but it'll be local – are you okay with that setting not being synced?

nico

Totally fine for it to be local. Thank you for the fast reply :)

wvl

Perhaps an inspired by https://hckrnews.com would be appropriate on the site?

btw, to those who want a dark mode for hcrknews, try: https://hckrnews.com/beta/

abnercoimbre

I had no idea -- instant bookmark! Any insights as to why dark mode is in beta though?

postalcoder

There was already one in the about page but I added some verbiage more prominently up top as well.

aryan14

Doesn’t look good on mobile, difficult to use

postalcoder

can you share your os/browser?

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atomic128

"Random recent" browsing is the best way to read Hacker News. It's not addictive, it gives you a quick sample of what people are thinking about recently, prevents your own biases from narrowing your view, etc. For example, https://rnsaffn.com/zg2/ where each page refresh gives you a random post, plus its parent thread, plus some detail about that post's author's history.