No shame in doing something that already exists for yourself. But at this point I think it wouldn't be asked too much to just ask your favorite agent to check first if someone already implemented your idea in the past and then consider if your vision is really distinct enough to warrant anther instance of whatever you want to build.
True, but imo there's also nothing particulrarly special about telling your agent to (re)build something that already existed (in various flavours) before.
I packed the thought into "consider if your vision is really distinct enough": make it better, make it weird, or make it recreationally (i.e. by hand). Make it opinionated, in Minecraft, whatever, but give it at least some new substance.
It's also fine to do Hacker Tube or Hacker Times (it's really not about this specific instance) for the 100th time, but if nothing else distinguishes it from the others than "I wanted to have one too", maybe it's not the curiosity-inspiring thing to share on HN we should strive for.
Maybe that can happen through custom instructions. But I guess, by default the agent will happily do extra work and spend lots of tokens on “redundant” projects.
We're going to enter an era of fragmentation and silos like never imagined before. It'll be terribly wonderful, with everyone getting exactly what they want.
You're probably right, but i think this is a human-led issue, not one brought on by tech, though it does exacerbate it.
As someone committed to transdisciplinary work, I think the tech also really supports this - i can do lit reviews on topics and cross-reference much more easily, which gives me more time for reading and thinking (both of which are also falling out of fashion, but that's another story)
wow quite a list - my version of it is https://thedailyfront.johnnys.page which I built for myself, to read it on my tablet on my way to the office. A new issue is generated automatically every morning.
My goal was to have something that is self-contained with every article directly readable on the site and to have the discussion there as well
> Ah, Manufacturing Consent—the font that doesn’t just scream “serious journalism,” it calmly editorializes it in 144-point Fraktur while subtly nudging your worldview.
Unfortunately feels too much like an LLM output for me.
Isn't what people pay for with the NYT or other publications, the journalism and editing? Like, the UI isn't why people pay for it.
Given that this seems to just be a re-skin, why a full site that updates hourly, instead of just a browser extension that rewrites the content in-place live?
The instant value I got from this is actually something that resembles journalism and editing, even if it’s just an LLM doing the job: the rewriting of headlines along with a half-decent editorial summary paragraph gives me a clear overview of what each link is actually about without the usual puzzling over what the cryptic HN headline is trying to say.
Yeah. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321605 — what the hell is this? Why do people click on random links allegedly belonging to no name projects? What are these projects about? Fascinating.
This is great! Very readable and feels like a nice way to browse articles. I tend to gloss over stuff in the HN wall of text sometimes so this breaks the links up in a useful way. Nice job.
Yeah, it does make the stories a lot more readable, HN just has bullet points of links making it slightly hard to follow everything the only thing the site is missing is a games tab like the NY Times.
Fun. I have a visceral dislike for the NYT, so the association is actually a negative, haha — but I could get over it.
The tradeoff of the Hacker Times design is increased information for each story but lower density of stories compared to the HN homepage. The high-density design of the HN page is probably optimal for my habits, even though some of the user-submitted headlines are opaque enough that I miss some things I would otherwise click on.
This reminds me of an idea I had a while ago; it would be nice if I could receive a paper daily/weekly of interesting articles, updates in the world, think pieces, etc. that weren't as broad as daily news or as opinionated. Just things that people found interesting or things happening around us without the political bias (on either side).
The paper side would just be to anti-digitize my life more, feels like it would be almost like a paper RSS feed.
I wanted exactly the same thing, so I built https://morningsift.com.
You can use it to create your own daily newsletters from topics, specific websites, youtube channels, X accounts, etc. This is totally free.
You can even create it as a daily podcast, but I had to charge for this option, as it can get expensive to run every day.
If you give it a shot, I would love to get any feedback!
It wasn't physical, but there was a slick app for the 1st gen of iPad called Early Edition which was basically just curated RSS feeds presented in the style of a newspaper. I was only able to find one image of it. I don't think the app exists anymore, unfortunately.
Early versions of Instapaper had a nice way to push out a Kindle "magazine" with recently-captured articles that I loved. This was circa...2010, 2011? An age long past.
If you can track down some decent sources that you like (maybe something like Kagi News, https://www.positive.news/, a good local paper if you have one), you could with little effort vibe up a daily printout and have it waiting for you when you get up each day. For a fun version, there's plenty of cheap thermal printers on aliexpress and similar that'd give you a non-US Letter/A4 version so it doesn't feel like Yet Another Document.
Kagi has a news site/app that updates once per day with the highlights from various categories of news.
I would imagine one could take something like that, and have program fetch it each morning, format it nicely, and print out a front page overview of what's going on. Just pick up the paper from the printer each morning.
This idea might be fine for a front page, but would fall apart when you start getting into long articles and think pieces. You'd be burning through a lot of paper.
Not exactly what you’re asking for, but a big fan of Hacker Newsletter, which emails you top HN articles. What you’re asking for is a little utopian, HN is the closest thing I’ve found
Back when people still understood that they don't need to know about every single "breaking" news story on the planet the instant it happens.
For a couple of months, I took a digital news break. I only read one national paper on Sundays, and the local paper twice a week. Amazingly, I didn't burst into flames or get stranger dangered. I felt both calm and informed. I plan to resume that pattern after the election.
FOMO is the drug. The tech industry is the dealer.
Here's a JS bookmarklet I use to apply dark mode to any website. It tries to preserve colors and avoids inverting graphics. Add a new bookmark to your toolbar and paste in that JS in place of the link. I hope you find it useful!
You can adjust the theme to your liking and I find it actually quite pleasant.
No subscription, no login, mobile friendly and it has been stable and online for several years.
Somehow this particular formulation makes me scream internally. It's not the classic print edition of the NYT that everybody grew up with, it's the click-maxing online version...
For me I’m thinking about the postmodern pastiche of it, as in Jameson’s Late Capitalism, wherein the NYT (while in many ways not a fair and trustworthy entity) earns its credibility through the measure it takes of risk before publication— this project would reproduce the aesthetic identity of such carefulness without actually containing it.
At least on mobile, the format is much more reminiscent of slashdot.
Man, what a tragic waste of a great .com era community. The whole community self-moderation thing worked ok before the more worthwhile people left. Now they can’t even be arsed to pop by once an hour to remove the multi-page swastika ascii art comments.
It had too high of an influence to integrity ratio, and got infiltrated by motivated actors. That is not an uncommon dynamic. Every democratic forum kind of medium with significance becomes a target for career propagandists and con artists and so on.
This is so cool! Definitely liked the title font :)
I do wonder if this kind of republishing is compliant with the original site? As in, if one can store the content vs. not and just lazily convert live - have been curious about the copyright rules & practices in this area.
Just for your information, if you care about the reachability of your project: this site, like all ChatGPT sites, is blocked in countries that are banned by ChatGPT (e.g., Hong Kong). And because it uses a custom domain, it cannot be automatically proxied as I have set up for ChatGPT domains, which is slightly annoying.
Guess I missed ChatGPT sites, I presume it's exactly what I envision, you can make an accessible website with ChatGPT? If so, how do you know this is one?
washedup is right, of course, that the community is many people with many views (though the point should be made less snarkily). Of course HN disagrees with itself; it's not a self to begin with.
I think there's another factor: it takes time to find the best ways of using such new tools. The community is working this out slowly (as is society generally) and it is naturally a lagging phenomenon.
Seeing generated sites like OP and karpathy's HackerTube (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510) which look good and don't have the obvious-LLM sameiness that so many others do, is an interesting step along this way. It's also refreshing. There's no intrinsic reason why generated software should look bad or work poorly.
My point is that people will complain about GenAI but they actually love/enjoy AI generated content or projects as long as they fit what they're looking for.
I also regularly complain about AI generated content. I do that mostly, because it's often either
- extremely uninspired design and UX wise (e.g. the classical beige/serif AI slop website),
- full of obvious and stupid mistakes (e.g. those shitty infographics on social media),
- just mimics the real thing, but misses the actual purpose (e.g. again those shitty infographics on social media)
- or is ridiculously overloaded with features and documentation (e.g. many AI generated software tools on GitHub)
That's repelling to me, because it screams that the human behind it is himself lazy and uninspired. It's bland, overloaded or full of mistakes, because raw output is a commodity.
It feels like a waste of time to even consume something, that the author or developer wasn't willing to put actual effort and thought into.
But that's an artefact of how the author is using the tool and presenting the results.
It's not an inherent property of AI use itself. HackerTimes for example doesn't feel uninspired or bland. And i like it.
I remember there was a similar project like this posted a while ago. Turns out there are multiple. Here are just a few (that are still online):
A couple of months ago (so probably vibe-coded too):
https://thefrontpage.dev/
https://times.hntrends.net/
https://hackernewstimes.com/
This one even from 6 years ago:
https://www.wolfgangfaust.com/project/paper-hn/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669650, 627 points, 133 comments)
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=hackernews+newspaper
HN keeps reinventing HN-flavored things.
I built this to aggregate all the aggregators (like HackerTube, Hackerbooks etc.) that were popular a few days ago (they go back to 2011, at least).
https://hackeragain.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
No shame in doing something that already exists for yourself. But at this point I think it wouldn't be asked too much to just ask your favorite agent to check first if someone already implemented your idea in the past and then consider if your vision is really distinct enough to warrant anther instance of whatever you want to build.
There is nothing particularly special about building something first.
True, but imo there's also nothing particulrarly special about telling your agent to (re)build something that already existed (in various flavours) before.
I packed the thought into "consider if your vision is really distinct enough": make it better, make it weird, or make it recreationally (i.e. by hand). Make it opinionated, in Minecraft, whatever, but give it at least some new substance.
It's also fine to do Hacker Tube or Hacker Times (it's really not about this specific instance) for the 100th time, but if nothing else distinguishes it from the others than "I wanted to have one too", maybe it's not the curiosity-inspiring thing to share on HN we should strive for.
None of these are listed in the guidelines on HN.
Maybe that can happen through custom instructions. But I guess, by default the agent will happily do extra work and spend lots of tokens on “redundant” projects.
We're going to enter an era of fragmentation and silos like never imagined before. It'll be terribly wonderful, with everyone getting exactly what they want.
You're probably right, but i think this is a human-led issue, not one brought on by tech, though it does exacerbate it.
As someone committed to transdisciplinary work, I think the tech also really supports this - i can do lit reviews on topics and cross-reference much more easily, which gives me more time for reading and thinking (both of which are also falling out of fashion, but that's another story)
wow quite a list - my version of it is https://thedailyfront.johnnys.page which I built for myself, to read it on my tablet on my way to the office. A new issue is generated automatically every morning. My goal was to have something that is self-contained with every article directly readable on the site and to have the discussion there as well
I actually liked https://thefrontpage.dev/
A shame that it broke a few weeks ago. These projects tends to get abandoned after a while.
It's been working fine for me most days. I came here from there just now.
Yup, I specifically only linked working sites, since not all I checked were online anymore.
https://help.fivefilters.org/pdf-newspaper/screenshots.html#...
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damn the vibecoded ones look a lot better
> Masthead set in Manufacturing Consent
I like the description for Manufacturing Consent font:
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Manufacturing+Consent/abou...
https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/manufacturingc...
While I like the premise, the opening text:
> Ah, Manufacturing Consent—the font that doesn’t just scream “serious journalism,” it calmly editorializes it in 144-point Fraktur while subtly nudging your worldview.
Unfortunately feels too much like an LLM output for me.
(Which is probably post-ironic in this context?)
Reminds me of furniture descriptions in the Sims
Isn't what people pay for with the NYT or other publications, the journalism and editing? Like, the UI isn't why people pay for it.
Given that this seems to just be a re-skin, why a full site that updates hourly, instead of just a browser extension that rewrites the content in-place live?
Yes, but it's still nice to have a good UI. HN has many things that one can find inconvenient.
The instant value I got from this is actually something that resembles journalism and editing, even if it’s just an LLM doing the job: the rewriting of headlines along with a half-decent editorial summary paragraph gives me a clear overview of what each link is actually about without the usual puzzling over what the cryptic HN headline is trying to say.
Yeah. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321605 — what the hell is this? Why do people click on random links allegedly belonging to no name projects? What are these projects about? Fascinating.
Quoting the show hn introduction: "I thought it would be fun"
I think we can leave it at that no?
I think I'd prefer NYT in Hackernews form
not sure, do the have comments & discussions?
Lot of people come just for comments
I don’t think the pay wall is working.
I was about to type this exactly!!
me too! does this say something about us or about the [T|t]imes?
This is cool. I built an HN reader recently too - this one is inspired by the old Apollo for Reddit app on iOS:
https://hnollo.com/
That’s cool. Loved Apollo
This is great! Very readable and feels like a nice way to browse articles. I tend to gloss over stuff in the HN wall of text sometimes so this breaks the links up in a useful way. Nice job.
Yeah, it does make the stories a lot more readable, HN just has bullet points of links making it slightly hard to follow everything the only thing the site is missing is a games tab like the NY Times.
Fun. I have a visceral dislike for the NYT, so the association is actually a negative, haha — but I could get over it.
The tradeoff of the Hacker Times design is increased information for each story but lower density of stories compared to the HN homepage. The high-density design of the HN page is probably optimal for my habits, even though some of the user-submitted headlines are opaque enough that I miss some things I would otherwise click on.
Neat. To-do: Give HN the ONION treatment? :-) https://theonion.com/
Was kinda filled with N-gate, but they stopped updating.
http://n-gate.com/
'twas a sad day when N-gate went quiet.
This reminds me of an idea I had a while ago; it would be nice if I could receive a paper daily/weekly of interesting articles, updates in the world, think pieces, etc. that weren't as broad as daily news or as opinionated. Just things that people found interesting or things happening around us without the political bias (on either side).
The paper side would just be to anti-digitize my life more, feels like it would be almost like a paper RSS feed.
I wanted exactly the same thing, so I built https://morningsift.com. You can use it to create your own daily newsletters from topics, specific websites, youtube channels, X accounts, etc. This is totally free. You can even create it as a daily podcast, but I had to charge for this option, as it can get expensive to run every day. If you give it a shot, I would love to get any feedback!
It wasn't physical, but there was a slick app for the 1st gen of iPad called Early Edition which was basically just curated RSS feeds presented in the style of a newspaper. I was only able to find one image of it. I don't think the app exists anymore, unfortunately.
https://imgur.com/a/5sw6zOP
I found an archive of their app story entry with more screenshots, linked from the archive of the developer's site.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131020160134/https://itunes.ap...
Oh nice! I used it back on a first gen iPad in 2010 and the editorial-style layout meets curated RSS feeds was hard to beat.
Early versions of Instapaper had a nice way to push out a Kindle "magazine" with recently-captured articles that I loved. This was circa...2010, 2011? An age long past.
If you can track down some decent sources that you like (maybe something like Kagi News, https://www.positive.news/, a good local paper if you have one), you could with little effort vibe up a daily printout and have it waiting for you when you get up each day. For a fun version, there's plenty of cheap thermal printers on aliexpress and similar that'd give you a non-US Letter/A4 version so it doesn't feel like Yet Another Document.
Kagi has a news site/app that updates once per day with the highlights from various categories of news.
I would imagine one could take something like that, and have program fetch it each morning, format it nicely, and print out a front page overview of what's going on. Just pick up the paper from the printer each morning.
This idea might be fine for a front page, but would fall apart when you start getting into long articles and think pieces. You'd be burning through a lot of paper.
Not exactly what you’re asking for, but a big fan of Hacker Newsletter, which emails you top HN articles. What you’re asking for is a little utopian, HN is the closest thing I’ve found
>Hacker Newsletter, which emails you top HN articles.
have you read it recently? Is it still the authentic articles? (as opposed to ads for whatever you were browsing a few minutes earlier.)
You just described what Time magazine was.
Back when people still understood that they don't need to know about every single "breaking" news story on the planet the instant it happens.
For a couple of months, I took a digital news break. I only read one national paper on Sundays, and the local paper twice a week. Amazingly, I didn't burst into flames or get stranger dangered. I felt both calm and informed. I plan to resume that pattern after the election.
FOMO is the drug. The tech industry is the dealer.
I just want HN in dark mode....
Here's a JS bookmarklet I use to apply dark mode to any website. It tries to preserve colors and avoids inverting graphics. Add a new bookmark to your toolbar and paste in that JS in place of the link. I hope you find it useful!
https://gist.github.com/mpetrovich/b3e4ec291d21bbdbe17b1adf4...
I use an alternative front end to Hacker News https://hn.premii.com
You can adjust the theme to your liking and I find it actually quite pleasant. No subscription, no login, mobile friendly and it has been stable and online for several years.
>I just want HN in dark mode....
Dark Reader extension for Firefox, works on mobile and desktop. I constantly forget this setup and blinds myself when I access HN from elsewhere.
Dark Reader Mode for Firefox works well for me! ;)
I would be surprised if nobody already created a plugin for firefox/chrome that adds dark mode honestly
Somehow this particular formulation makes me scream internally. It's not the classic print edition of the NYT that everybody grew up with, it's the click-maxing online version...
For me I’m thinking about the postmodern pastiche of it, as in Jameson’s Late Capitalism, wherein the NYT (while in many ways not a fair and trustworthy entity) earns its credibility through the measure it takes of risk before publication— this project would reproduce the aesthetic identity of such carefulness without actually containing it.
I'm liking all of the remixes.
We built a combined books/video version as well in our app library.
https://medium.com/@vektormemory/vektor-2-0-4-hacker-news-bo...
At least on mobile, the format is much more reminiscent of slashdot.
Man, what a tragic waste of a great .com era community. The whole community self-moderation thing worked ok before the more worthwhile people left. Now they can’t even be arsed to pop by once an hour to remove the multi-page swastika ascii art comments.
It had too high of an influence to integrity ratio, and got infiltrated by motivated actors. That is not an uncommon dynamic. Every democratic forum kind of medium with significance becomes a target for career propagandists and con artists and so on.
This is so cool! Definitely liked the title font :)
I do wonder if this kind of republishing is compliant with the original site? As in, if one can store the content vs. not and just lazily convert live - have been curious about the copyright rules & practices in this area.
Needs a better title font for headlines.
Georgia Bold is not fit for the purpose, and there's no earthly reason to use it at 55px.
There are so many good serif fonts to choose from on Google Fonts. An embarrassment of riches.
Certificate issue, Firefox refuses to load it.
Amazing project! I can finally breath!
If I cancel can I get the service for $1/week? That's my favorite NYT feature.
Just for your information, if you care about the reachability of your project: this site, like all ChatGPT sites, is blocked in countries that are banned by ChatGPT (e.g., Hong Kong). And because it uses a custom domain, it cannot be automatically proxied as I have set up for ChatGPT domains, which is slightly annoying.
Guess I missed ChatGPT sites, I presume it's exactly what I envision, you can make an accessible website with ChatGPT? If so, how do you know this is one?
Having the paragraph under the title reminds me of slashdot.org.
so hacker tube, hacker books and now hacker times. what's next? hacker food?
HackerHackerNews, a collection of the best Hacker News comments that were recommended by comments on Hacker News.
The problem ofcourse is when your measure becomes a target, it stops being a measure, and all that.
Hacker food already well defined in 1995 by Razor and Blade - clearly jolt cola :)
Source: https://youtu.be/O7AKquUtTvs?is=MJjR5eF9UY_JAo12
Hold my hacker beer...
pschorr thing, no problem
PTSD from clicking NYT links made me expect a paywall
Archive link?
Well done.
OH. I thought you meant HN but with paid subscriptions. Disappointed.
Work in progress. Getting the "Impossible to Cancel" stuff right is surprisingly difficult.
Hey Wenhao, saw CheapGPT on Show HN cool build! Quick security heads up, found small prompt leak. Can I send 1 page fix?
Click here for this one weird trick…
But honestly, the headlines there are refreshing
What about the ads, the tracking, the pop-ups and the limited-time special offers?
i'm open to the idea that its the NYTimes that needs a HN inspired version
Here ya go:
https://www.nytimes.com/rss
Hackertube? NYTimes Hackernews? HackerBooks?
What a time to be alive ...
Still waiting for Doom running on HackerNews or Doom-inspired HN ...
Next is Hacker X :)
>Next is Hacker X :)
Please don't :(
/s Please do! Who knows what will stick when you throw it at the wall?
It's cool that you made something, but I don't like this.
That looks so convincing, I was expecting the paywall popup to appear any second...
It would be more realistic if it was just a paywall.
Wait a bit! Where is a paywall?
NYT but without the annoying google login, or subscribe for $1 paywalls! And I don't need someone linking to archive.is everywhere.
Love this.
HN reminds me a lot of Instagram.
People complain about AI generated content, then proceeds to give a dancing cat AI reel 1 million likes.
People here complain about vibe coded apps, then proceed to upvote this to the front page.
washedup is right, of course, that the community is many people with many views (though the point should be made less snarkily). Of course HN disagrees with itself; it's not a self to begin with.
I think there's another factor: it takes time to find the best ways of using such new tools. The community is working this out slowly (as is society generally) and it is naturally a lagging phenomenon.
Seeing generated sites like OP and karpathy's HackerTube (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510) which look good and don't have the obvious-LLM sameiness that so many others do, is an interesting step along this way. It's also refreshing. There's no intrinsic reason why generated software should look bad or work poorly.
My point is that people will complain about GenAI but they actually love/enjoy AI generated content or projects as long as they fit what they're looking for.
It's not about the tools.
I also regularly complain about AI generated content. I do that mostly, because it's often either
- extremely uninspired design and UX wise (e.g. the classical beige/serif AI slop website),
- full of obvious and stupid mistakes (e.g. those shitty infographics on social media),
- just mimics the real thing, but misses the actual purpose (e.g. again those shitty infographics on social media)
- or is ridiculously overloaded with features and documentation (e.g. many AI generated software tools on GitHub)
That's repelling to me, because it screams that the human behind it is himself lazy and uninspired. It's bland, overloaded or full of mistakes, because raw output is a commodity.
It feels like a waste of time to even consume something, that the author or developer wasn't willing to put actual effort and thought into.
But that's an artefact of how the author is using the tool and presenting the results.
It's not an inherent property of AI use itself. HackerTimes for example doesn't feel uninspired or bland. And i like it.
It's almost as if there are different groups that have different views and upvote different things.
Goomba.
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add an AI section that is filtered out of technology and you'd have yourself a nice way to browse HN.
i'm pretty happy with the existing way of browsing HN. i hope it never changes.