Hacker News front page as a site | Hacker News

Hacker News front page as a site (thefrontpage.dev)

434 points by thatxliner 15 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 118 comments

| m132 15 days ago | next [–] Love the summaries, I must say some stories I haven't considered interesting seeing them in the original HN view only caught my attention after my eyes landed on the summary.At the same time, I very much dislike the layout. Masonry-style layouts, at least to me, feel more "artsy" than practical. Multiple rows being displayed at once, with the most crucial information being chaotically all over the place instead of arranged in a way that makes it easy to scan it with your eyes, make me feel like I'm bombarded with information. It's very hard to follow along and very easy to miss articles; almost anxiety-inducing, even. There's hardly any point to this on a website; it's not like you're wasting any paper.

| sverhagen 14 days ago | parent | next [–] I think the layout wants to look like a newspaper, but just doesn't quite end up looking like one. where a newspaper may have longer columns mixed in with shorter articles, this one has mostly short articles that then don't quite align. But hey, good luck to this project!

| joseda-hg 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] One big thing with the news paper is that there was a larger main story that worked as a visual anchor and the columns/subsections could be placed freely on the edges as necessary

| subarctic 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] Great layout on mobile, but not so great on wider screens, I find it hard to scan as well

| niutech 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] If you love summaries on HN, check out https://hncompanion.com.

| freedomben 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Having used it myself, I see the tell-tale signs of Claude using the /frontend-design skill. Good work! I haven't yet had it give me something I actually like, but this is good. Also very clever idea! I approve :-)Suggestion though: The text is really small and impossible to read at regular zoom. I had to zoom it to 200% to be able to read it. I'd suggest increasing the default text size

| tech-historian 14 days ago | parent | next [–] I've noticed that Claude always defaults to really small text. They need to train readability into it.

| antoine-codefly 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Indeed!

| satiric 12 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] This is Hackernews - the unreadable font size is a feature, not a bug reply

| zoom6628 14 days ago | prev | next [–] This is gorgeous. Makes me feel like I'm picking up an old news sheet. Forces me to read slowly from which I then enjoy the reading much more it's like difference of drinking a fine wine from a glass instead of a straw in the wine bottle.Kudos to the author.

| lionkor 14 days ago | parent | next [–]

feel like I'm picking up an old news sheetexcept those were laid out by hand with intent, whereas this one just kind of dumps all stories on a masonry board and calls it a day. This is likely why reading a (good) newspaper feels effortless, whereas reading this "forces you to read slowly".

| ahmedfromtunis 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] I'd say that that's a feature of modern-ish newspapers with "advanced" layouting techniques from early to mid 20th century.A news sheet from THE olden days (eg Victorian era), looks more like a wall of text, set as tightly -- an uniformly -- as possibly, which is not surprising considering the limitations imposed by the technology of the day.As for story selection, I think the collective hivemind of hn-ers would be a worthy substitute for an editor in chief.

| hspeiser 15 days ago | prev | next [–] The inception effect here is hilarious. Watching this get its own front page while the subtitle lags behind with the previous top posts is weirdly funny.

| onemoresoop 15 days ago | parent | next [–] I can’t see this post on the news frontpage though

| Barbing 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Screenshot - https://i.ibb.co/zTTK1hQR/IMG-6526.jpg

| est 15 days ago | prev | next [–] I am almost certain this layout is generated by AI, because I vibe coded the exact same newspaper-like style weeks ago.

| oliviergg 14 days ago | parent | next [–] Yes ! Building a news website with Claude design give me the same design, background color, text size …

| t3r 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Somehow, Claude seems to have developed a default nostalgic newspaper aesthetic despite being so young.

| celltalk 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] me too… this felt awkward: https://duobook.co/explore-stories

| ammar_x 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Cool, but body font size is too small for comfortable reading!

| Retr0id 15 days ago | parent | next [–] Sounds like an authentic HN experience to me!

| jillesvangurp 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] I keep it at 150% zoom level. That would still be on the small side if it was the default. But at least it's somewhat readable this way.

| throwawayAAUGGH 15 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] OP, I love the font size as is, have multiple options if you're going to change things! Remember the users that loved things as they were!

| stagas 15 days ago | root | parent | next [–] I did increase it in the meanwhile from when that comment was posted.

| gblargg 15 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] I whipped up a quick uBO rule to fix that (also makes meta-information lines readable):

thefrontpage.dev##p.newspaper-copy:style(line-height: normal !important; font-size: 1rem !important;) thefrontpage.dev##p.article-meta:style(font-size: 1rem !important; font-weight: normal !important; letter-spacing: normal !important;)

EDIT: changed to 1rem as someone else suggested

| Wowfunhappy 15 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] I agree, but I think it's that small because otherwise, the justified text results in ridiculous spacing.OP, consider reducing the number of columns from 4 to 3 (at least below very wide viewports), increasing the font size, and then also allowing hyphenation. I think the last will help a lot with the justification problem.

| iamalizard 15 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Or have a button that makes the text left-aligned for easier reading.

| Wowfunhappy 15 days ago | root | parent | next [–] I think that very much defeats the point of making it look like a newspaper.

| entropie 15 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Which might be fine? Since web pages are not newspaper sites one might say its just not the ideal way of presenting information.

| Wowfunhappy 15 days ago | root | parent | next [–] This entire submission is styled to look like a newspaper. If you just want information that's available at news.ycombinator.com.

| daviding 15 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] An overridden .newspaper-copy { font-size: 1rem; } works well.

| ymolodtsov 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Building a Hacker News client has long been a rite of passage because the read-only API is freely available, cool to see more experiments like this.I believe at this point pretty much half of the users might have their own client :)

| cientifico 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Love it.I would love that the size of the article is based on the number of upvotes (hardcoded).* > 500 => take full width or 3. * 500 > 100 => Show it as right now. * > 100 => Just show the title.

| koolala 14 days ago | prev | next [–] "Hacker News front page as a siteThe Front Page highlights a diverse set of tech and science stories"It is interesting the summary it generated for itself wasn't able to describe itself as a Hacker News content view. It missed the big picture meta context.

| hk1337 15 days ago | prev | next [–] I thought it already had a site?

| thrownthatway 15 days ago | parent | next [–] It doesn’t have a website, it has a motherfucking website.And it’s fucking perfect.

| Barbing 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] It’s exceptional. Here in camp “userscripts can offer some improvements”, would necessarily not say perfect, but definitely amazing how it’s continuing to stand the test of time.

| thrownthatway 13 days ago | root | parent | next [–] https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/reply

| Barbing 13 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Beautiful reply

| skinwill 14 days ago | prev | next [–] You need some filler for the space at the bottom. Something like ads from the 1800's for quack medical devices or Radium Therapy. Maybe something wildly misogynistic advertising laudanum.

| dave7 15 days ago | prev | next [–] I love it! I discovered it'll switch to a 3 column view if I take the zoom to 200%, I'd maybe prefer it at less but it's a bit tricky to guess if that's true or not. Regardless, it's very nice. And infinite scroll for the hackernews feed is a bonus!

| subarctic 14 days ago | prev | next [–] I love this. Very cool that it made the front page and therefore has an entry for itself. I wonder if the summary could be updated again so that it includes a reference to itself in its summary of itself

| DSemba 14 days ago | prev | next [–] I actually recently submitted something similar - https://briefin.com/hackernews/Less like good-old newspaper, but instead made for scannability & readability, with discussion highlights for each story.Any feedback greatly appreciated!

| oefrha 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Using text-align: justify for questionable aesthetic purpose here really hurts readability, especially on a narrower viewport like the 1026px viewport of Safari with sidebar on an iPad Pro 12.9’’ (although it’s probably more of a problem of the four column layout on that specific narrow viewport; three should be better).

| stagas 15 days ago | parent | next [–] Made it 3, try again perhaps. Changing to text-align: left really destroys the aesthetic though.

| arecsu 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] I agree that text-align: justify should be the way to go. Don't discard having a "config" menu in the header somehow to change this option along body text size as some other people might find it useful, which could then use localstorage to preserve the settings. Love the website by the way! I'm used to skim through brutalist.report in a daily basis but this one may be a worthy replacement :)

| sheept 15 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] It could probably be helped a bit by enabling auto hyphenation, but ultimately browsers aren't optimized for typesetting narrow columns of text

| stagas 15 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Great idea, I'm trying this.

| gwbas1c 14 days ago | prev | next [–] One of the things I miss from Slashdot (I used to read it before HN) were the short summaries. Thanks!

| jesse_dot_id 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Beautifully unusable

| antoine-codefly 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Anything to make the site nicer on the eyes! I did this a while ago: https://antoinetoussaint.github.io/pretty-hackernews/

| rickydroll 14 days ago | prev | next [–] I love the presentation. My initial impression is that it's easier to read, in no small part due to the font choice, color palette, and tabloid-style layout. I would love to have an RSS reader that presents my RSS feed in the same way.

| chrisgen19 15 days ago | prev | next [–] I like the concept, the grid and the design. but the small text description is hurting my eyes.

| stagas 15 days ago | parent | next [–] Just made it a bit bigger.

| oldMobileOnWifi 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Nice. "The Register" meets Hacker News. The fonts an colouring might need a few tweaks.Still though, it takes me back to the original BetaNews.com and how Winamp.com used to do their news.

| dominicrose 14 days ago | prev | next [–] It renders really well! Sad not to see the Ferrari Luce though.

| samyxp17 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Pretty nice, Can you share some tech details and challenges

| stagas 14 days ago | parent | next [–] Thanks, technically it scrapes every 10 minutes the first 3 pages of HN and the first 3 /newest, fires up a Chrome instance with puppeteer, visits each site with a spoofed GoogleBot UserAgent to avoid paywalls, scrapes document.body.textContent, sends it to openrouter/free and asks to summarize. We also collect the opengraph images to show in that step. One difficulty was getting the responses to not be garbage enough but with some prompt tweaks that fixed. It runs on a small VPS with bun. Biggest challenge was setting up the deployment pipeline actually because I hadn't done it before. But now I can git push and it gets updated and restarts fine :)

| democracy 15 days ago | prev | next [–] This is great )) maybe do random templates similar to newspapers (like photo on the left, photo on the right, one block full width, then 3 columns, etc).

| HyperL0gi 14 days ago | prev | next [–] This is so cool! I'd love for it to have a front-page-like layout where "trending" news would have a bigger placement in the UIAnyway, great work :)

| bijowo1676 15 days ago | prev | next [–] looks lovely, but can you borrow text styling and typography from a modern media website like NYT WaPo or some other major news outlet?This would make it easier to read

| darkwater 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Nice idea, I would not use AI summaries though but the actual first X words from each link real text (and using the README for repos).

| 1e1a 14 days ago | parent | next [–] What about a global toggle to switch between the AI summaries and article snippets?

| darkwater 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] But defaulting to article snippets ;)

| ramon156 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Kind of makes me realize that the thumbnails sometimes make me click, while on HN the titles make me click. Weird how that works.

| wanoir 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Would be cool to see different column layouts too!

| irq-1 15 days ago | parent | next [–] Yea -- it could use votes to pick a hero article, or change summary length.

| fumeux_fume 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Nice! Happy to see the site appearing as itself on the front page doesn't cause some crazy recursive crash :)

| j-b 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Very nice. It'd be cool to have an option to collapse the summary content to skim through everything.

| stgo 14 days ago | prev | next [–] I hope the V2 will be like 'It happened tomorrow' (the 1944 movie with Veronica Lake)

| or_am_i 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Brilliant! IMO could be even better if the number of points/comments was easier to scan.

| revv00 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Cool, seems need some deduplication. Maybe when you turn to the new page, some items fall back.

| stagas 15 days ago | parent | next [–] It is possible. Will look into it.

| llagerlof 14 days ago | prev | next [–] I loved the mobile version. I disliked that bold text are scattered everywhere.

| HMCB 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Love. Relax the leading, though. The tight lines make it feel claustrophobic.

| anonu 15 days ago | prev | next [–] i love it. would be cool to get the date lookbacks too - like this https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-05-22

| hkeni 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Very nostalgic. Looks dope

| swordsith 12 days ago | prev | next [–] DON'T LET THE LIGHT DIE OUT! (bring it back up plz)reply

| fuzzythinker 13 days ago | prev | next [–] I go by comments count, so wish that count stands out more reply

| almyk 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Nice design, gives a cozy feeling similar to reading a newspaper

| BeetleB 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Why is the text one long paragraph? Makes it very hard to read?

| stagas 15 days ago | parent | next [–] Because I'm telling the AI "summarize it to one paragraph".

| gblargg 10 days ago | root | parent | next [–] BTW there's a summary today that has bullet-point markup and it just wraps around without proper formatting. Title is "Show HN: Tiny-vLLM – high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA".reply

| Barbing 14 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] w/o instruction to avoid the same generic “this is an article about” preambles (or non-SotA model)Not that summaries are reliable anyway. Big picture, maybe, but poor importance classification (bad at extracting key points). Understandable for this use case but unwilling to read potentially false summaries given risk I go around remembering them (never having read the original piece).

| sillysaurusx 15 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Could you explain in more detail how this works? Would it break for paywalled articles that HN links to? (Usually someone posts a workaround archive link in the comments, but your AI probably doesn’t account for that, right?)I’m writing something similar to Moltbook for HN where AIs browse HN’s front page and leave comments. But I wasn’t sure whether AIs could reliably browse an arbitrary website. (Paywalls would break it, as just one example.)But it seems like your AI works fine for all the sites. If you have time to explain, what exactly do you do to generate your summaries? Thanks!EDIT: I see that sometimes your summaries fail, e.g. “Ferrari Luce - Summary not available.” It looks like it fails because it’s a JS heavy site. But I was thinking a headless browser could take screenshots of the page and then feed the screenshots to AI. I’m not sure how practical that is to implement though.

| Barbing 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] The solutions to this don’t seem to be great for the web or polite to use. An industry exists to cheaply do it, but not very ethical and surely a massive ToS violator.

| hliyan 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] This was the natural length of a paragraph before the emergence of engagement driven microblogging.

| BeetleB 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] It's not about the length l. The point of a paragraph is to convey one idea. Some of the paragraphs don't do that.

| dangus 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Because its AI slop. It’s not a designed website.

| BeetleB 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] No, he admitted it's a prompt issue.

| insin 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Nice try at trying to get me to read the friendly articles ;)

| sergiulucaci 14 days ago | prev | next [–] this looks dope! what's next? a Hacker News radio?

| clacker-o-matic 15 days ago | prev | next [–] oh this is sick; i wonder where the curly bits at the top and bottom came from; based on the svg artifacts it looks converted from a raster

| stagas 15 days ago | parent | next [–] Tricks of the trade :)

| 46493168 14 days ago | prev | next [–] This reminds me of yahoo.co.jp in a good way

| galsapir 15 days ago | prev | next [–] hey that's pretty cool. I think I still prefer "distill HN" cleanliness though. What made you create this.

| thatxliner 15 days ago | parent | next [–] I didn’t make this lol; just something cool I’ve found

| classified 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Nice. I like the yellowish paper texture.

| brian_herman 14 days ago | prev | next [–] This is really cool a lot less clicking!

| smartial_arts 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Previews are v slow to load for some reason

| stagas 15 days ago | parent | next [–] Some of them are really large and I'm not resizing them or storing them, just proxying their og image directly. So they might be taking long to respond from the original source. Also getting hammerred by being in the front page.

| onemoresoop 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Its like reading a newspaper of sorts.

| ian_j_butler 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Why does someone go to the effort/expense of doing summaries without adding tags? The goal is less slop and not more, and this really just hurts usability after you've already spent money that could actually help? Isn't this the whole value proposition for literally everyone or am I nuts? I don't want a summary. I will switch immediately to the first alternative that allows tags/categories/filtering.

| stagas 14 days ago | parent | next [–] The summaries come from openrouter/free so they cost nothing. Could probably also ask the AI to produce tags, will do some experiments! Thanks for the suggestion!

| h0ek 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Great job. Looks awesome.

| i_am_a_peasant 14 days ago | prev | next [–] How do I turn to page 2?

| SilentM68 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Nice design, but I can't afford the $3.50 price of the cup of coffee, atm (◡︵◡)(◠‿◠)

| MadrasTh0rn 15 days ago | prev | next [–] This looks amazing!!!

| shauryaSan 10 days ago | prev | next [–] does this site no longer work?reply

| sublinear 15 days ago | prev | next [–] This page now contains itself.

| Akamant 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Bravo!

| thisisidiotic 10 days ago | prev | next [–] love it reply

| namrog84 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Is it just me or is there something slightly weird about scrolling? Maybe font or color. Im on mobile.

| cat-whisperer 14 days ago | prev | next [–] this looks sick

| dangus 14 days ago | prev | next [–] AI Slop

| delichon 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Now do clay tablets.

| himata4113 15 days ago | prev | next [–] this is now my new default for hackernews.

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