[HN Gopher] Show HN: Hacker News frontpage as a print newspaper ...
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Show HN: Hacker News frontpage as a print newspaper that you can
personalize
Author : nimbusega
Score : 208 points
Date : 2024-11-06 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yourhackernews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (yourhackernews.com)
| istillwritecode wrote:
| For those who prefer scrolling to reading I guess.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Good attempt but from the title I thought it would look like an
| actual print news paper
| nightpool wrote:
| Very cool! Looks like it has an XSS vector though :P
|
| https://i.imgur.com/5bbKiFc.png
| nightpool wrote:
| The print stylesheets are also kind of broken. With my
| printer's default margins, the page becomes an overlapping
| mess: https://i.imgur.com/lTlFz4l.png
|
| And even with margins turned off, stories are split "across"
| pages in a way that makes them useless for printing:
| https://i.imgur.com/SvmTGa8.png Need to pay more attention to
| your "break-inside" properties:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/break-insid...
| (and switch from using JS-generated absolute styles to using a
| CSS column layout or masonry grid)
| nimbusega wrote:
| Thank you! I missed that in my sleepiness. Should be fixed now.
| fdphoughton wrote:
| This is pretty cool, it's nice to have a clean interface that
| puts more focus on individual posts (as articles here) rather
| than tons of headlines where I feel I skim over posts a lot more
| (particularly the post about Jupiter only caught my attention on
| your site, not the front page).
|
| I'd like if there was some support for customising it without
| liking and disliking so I could push topics I'm interested in
| first (e.g. those tagged with emacs). It would also be nice to
| hide the like and dislike buttons in general as it gives more of
| a social media feel that the newspaper style UI does well to
| shake.
| stevage wrote:
| Interesting, for me it's a bit the opposite. In the standard
| view I really read every headline and consider what might be
| through the click. In this version I skim more in mindless
| scrolling fashion.
| berbec wrote:
| This is nice, but I prefer the simpler style of hckrnews.com
| vunderba wrote:
| There was an iOS app from practically a decade ago that did
| something very similar, but you could customize with RSS feeds,
| and it would turn it into a traditional looking newspaper.
|
| Sadly, I can't remember the name of it but it was pretty great.
| headclone wrote:
| I remember this app as well; "Flipreader" comes to mind but
| yields no Google results.
|
| It was the peak of RSS for me, beautiful UX, customizable, all
| the posts in sequential order if I wanted instead of
| algorithms...
|
| I remember it because useless when web publishers realized they
| were losing ad views to apps like these and all the posts
| became previews with links.
| soylentcola wrote:
| I believe you are thinking of Flipboard (still around, but a
| bit different nowadays).
| franzkappa wrote:
| I think you are referring to Flipboard, it is still in the
| AppStore
| brianfitz wrote:
| Flipboard. https://about.flipboard.com/
| otras wrote:
| A fun evolution would be to format it into a newspaper format,
| complete with headlines, front page, and "continue reading on
| page N", then print it out on large paper, fold it, and mail it
| to you.
|
| There's probably no money in it, but a physical weekly
| customized RSS feed highlights newspaper would be neat.
| vunderba wrote:
| Can't edit my post but it wasn't Flipboard.
|
| Found it - it was Instapaper!
|
| https://imgur.com/a/iFBme4f
|
| _EDIT: Well maybe not, this one seems more like a replacement
| for ReadLater /GetPocket whereas the one I used was purely
| based off RSS feeds. I used it on the original iPad 1st gen so
| it's probably long gone. I give up._
| frabjoused wrote:
| Very cool, seems like it updates on a delay though, which will
| probably kill usability.
|
| This post is not even on it.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| On brand with newspapers.
| nimbusega wrote:
| It updates every hour. This post is on it now!
| jgrahamc wrote:
| This doesn't look like a print newspaper. Print newspapers are
| much denser (in general) and have different headline sizes to
| emphasize the editor's choice of stories. This looks like a
| corporate blog home page or something. Some people will like this
| presentation; I'm pretty happy with HN as it is. But
| congratulations on shipping!
| SoftTalker wrote:
| For the rest of the news in a more HN-like format (at least at
| the top level) you might like https://lite.cnn.com/
| Bluecobra wrote:
| Also this site works great in text browsers like Lynx.
| jzombie wrote:
| Lynx wrapped in Docker:
|
| https://github.com/jzombie/docker-lynx
| minkzilla wrote:
| https://text.npr.org is also a text only version of npr
| aegypti wrote:
| I remember using both this and cnn lite 8 years ago quite a
| bit right around this time, cool to see they're still going
| strong.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yeah... it's really just not plausible at all...
| nimbusega wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! Print newspaper's have curation, which
| this lacks. I guess the main thing it takes from newspapers is
| the image and blurb that help give you a preview of the story.
| dangoor wrote:
| There is a form of curation on HN and "editorial judgment" on
| HN and that's in the points a post has. A closer
| approximation of a newspaper would be possible by looking at
| the points of a post and maybe comparing that to other posts
| and then sizing headlines appropriately based on how
| "important" the HN community sees a given story.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| this is exactly how my 2009 version (in my previous
| comment) chose to size and space its headlines
| nimbusega wrote:
| Yes, I agree. I think I will change the design to have a
| hierarchy.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| The other form of curation is place on the front page.
|
| That's probably closer to the editors choice in the context
| of HN.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| I agree, but I'm biased. I built basically the same app as OP
| back in 2009 and it had different headline sizes like a
| newspaper:
|
| https://github.com/gilesbowkett/hacker_newspaper/blob/master...
|
| I kept it running for 5 or 10 years but eventually let it die.
|
| _edit_ : I'm not hating on OP btw. their version has pics,
| which mine doesn't. just agreeing that I believe the visual
| hierarchy inherent to newspaper title design is an important
| benefit of the format.
| lysace wrote:
| > the visual hierarchy inherent to newspaper title design is
| an important benefit of the format
|
| Agreed. This is also why old-school print design product
| catalogs often had superior presentation compared to today's
| web UIs for browsing hierarchically organized products.
| Everything is given the same visual weight and is formatted
| the same way.
|
| Anyway, improving on what you did with the tooling that's
| easily available in 2024 but wasn't in 2009 seems like a fun
| challenge.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| yeah, digging up that screenshot (and the repo) really made
| me realize how primitive this solution was. it was also a
| very basic implementation of the whole headline sizes
| concept.
|
| there was an app called Flipboard at the time which did
| something similar, but for different news sources, although
| its model of interactivity was a bit more gimmicky than the
| endless scroll. (which, for all its faults, is really
| simple and easy to use.)
| efilife wrote:
| Yours is much better, exactly how I envisioned it to be
| yaj54 wrote:
| are there any good online designs that actually look like a
| print newspaper, with the features you describe?
|
| I've wanted to take a stab at it because I think it would be
| "neat" but haven't actually found any good reference
| implementations.
|
| also seems like with almost everyone on mobile it's just not
| worth it.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Papers only work because they know exactly what the view
| portal is and can design the layout relative to that. Unless
| you have an a3 sized screen this will not work very well
| online.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| You can achieve some of the proportions with vw and vh
| units inside the article and column containers. Much of the
| effect comes from nicely laid out columns more than how
| many columns wide is your digital broadsheet, so the
| aesthetic scales okay on smaller screens. On mobile screens
| it's just nice-looking individual columns.
| 2big2fail_47 wrote:
| i think the nytimes landing page does a good job at looking
| and feeling like an analogue newspaper
| aurbano wrote:
| That's a great observation actually! They should've made the
| design do that automatically based on story ranking
| mahin wrote:
| Nice! I recently worked on a chrome extension that personalizes
| the frontpage based on embeddings.
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-explorer/amiaaon...
| pflenker wrote:
| This is very nice! If you - make it a pwa/web clip - link to the
| discussions - make the images colored again I'd use it over the
| regular hacker news ui any day. I know your use case is printing
| it out, but it's fantastic for usage on a tablet.
| creative72 wrote:
| The images in the website are in grayscale.
| nimbusega wrote:
| I thought it would fit the grayscale of newspapers. I can add
| an option to show them in color.
| billpg wrote:
| Anyone remember "Hacker Monthly"? Years ago it was a monthly PDF
| with nicely laid out copies of popular articles that had been
| highly voted on here.
| kqr wrote:
| They also printed physical magazines and shipped them out. It
| was the first time I received a professionally printed copy of
| something I had authored.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| Love this project! I would love to collab, please consider open-
| sourcing this project, or let me know if I can contribute in some
| way
| twochillin wrote:
| Yeah would love to play with a couple PRs on this
| hakube wrote:
| Looks like the NYT
| ilaksh wrote:
| Amazing..and you're telling me you made this with less than 600
| programmers?
| nimbusega wrote:
| I made this to experiment with embeddings and explore how
| different ways of displaying information affect your perception.
|
| It gets the top 100 stories, sends their html to GPT-4 to extract
| the main content (this was not producing good enough results with
| html parsing) and then gets an embedding using the title and
| content.
|
| Likes/dislikes are stored in local storage and compared against
| all stories using cosine similarity to find the most relevant
| stories.
|
| It costs about $10/day to run. I was thinking of offering
| additional value for a small subscription. Maybe more pages of
| the newspaper, full story content/comments, a weekly digest or
| ePub export or something?
| ketzo wrote:
| I think some of the highest value from HN comes from the
| comments, and it's much harder to find the "best" ones, since
| they might be in threads you might not have otherwise read.
|
| Not sure if it's a "premium feature" so to speak, but would be
| very cool to extend this to comments generally.
| nimbusega wrote:
| Definitely, comments are usually better than the article. I
| thought of a 'Letters to the Editors' section that shows top
| comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments) and
| references the parent story, but it might not be as useful
| without the context.
|
| Maybe 'See Comments' here could load the comments on the same
| page? In a newspaper like style.
| jzombie wrote:
| > Likes/dislikes are stored in local storage and compared
| against all stories using cosine similarity to find the most
| relevant stories.
|
| You're referring to using the embeddings for cosine similarity?
|
| I am doing something similar with stocks. Taking several
| decades worth of 10-Q statements for a majority of stocks and
| weighted ETF holdings and using an autoencoder to generate
| embeddings that I run cosine and euclidean algorithms on via
| Rust WASM.
| banga wrote:
| Sadly the media="print" view does not provide usable output.
| All4All wrote:
| All I get is "Failed to load stories," am I doing something
| wrong? Is there something I need to configure before things will
| load?
| SamCoding wrote:
| I just had the same problem and solved it. You have to switch
| off your adblocker.
| All4All wrote:
| Interesting, yup, looks like it was blocked by the network
| PiHole.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I guess you mean a digital newspaper with a layout inspired by
| print newspapers. It's definitely not a print newspaper, I know
| because I tried folding it in half to read on the train, and all
| that happened was my laptop screen broke.
| SamCoding wrote:
| I'm getting the an error of "Failed to fetch stories"
|
| The console error is: (index):464 Error loading stories:
| TypeError: Failed to construct 'URL': Invalid URL at
| (index):482:36 at Array.forEach (<anonymous>) at
| NewspaperApp.displayStories ((index):471:25) at
| NewspaperApp.loadStories ((index):461:26) at async
| NewspaperApp.initialize ((index):418:17)
|
| Can anyone help? I really want to use this product it seems
| great.
| SamCoding wrote:
| Just fixed my own problem! You have to switch off your
| adblocker.
| ideasphere wrote:
| It's funny how frequently people try to reinvent the wheel re:
| how this site is laid out. It's the best part about it!
| pncnmnp wrote:
| Looks super neat! I've had a longtime dream of working on a
| similar project, but I want to make it "Daily Prophet" styled,
| inspired by the Harry Potter series -
| https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Daily_Prophet?file=Daily....
| With gifs and effects :)
|
| A few years ago, a similar project was posted on HN that I
| thought was really cool too - E Ink smart screen puts a newspaper
| on your wall (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323).
| paddy_m wrote:
| I would pay money, $1+ postage to maybe $5 + postage to
| physically print out tweet streams and other articles and mail
| them to some old people I know.
|
| I'm thinking specifically of DieWorkwear on twitter, but others
| too.
| eigenhombre wrote:
| I liked this for two seconds; then all the pictures loaded in the
| browser window, and its usefulness to me plummeted. Similar to
| other commenters, I actually prefer text-only in this context; in
| particular, the first picture displayed just now was animated,
| and incredibly distracting.
|
| I would probably use this or at least play with it extensively if
| not for this "feature." I find that, unlike "real" newspapers,
| leading images in blog posts and even much larger sites are
| frequently a net negative (a trend greatly worsened with the
| advent of AI image generators).
| nimbusega wrote:
| That's fair. How about a toggle to not show images?
| KerryJones wrote:
| Is there a reason you chose not to display the comment count?
| belmead wrote:
| This is excellent! I've been using it all day. I do wish it was a
| bit denser (similar to Drudge Report), but the product is neat
| enough as is. Congrats!
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(page generated 2024-11-06 23:00 UTC)