Show HN: Hacker News frontpage as a print newspaper that you can personalize

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!

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/

Yeah… it’s really just not plausible at all…

Also this site works great in text browsers like Lynx.

https://text.npr.org is also a text only version of npr

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.

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.

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.

this is exactly how my 2009 version (in my previous comment) chose to size and space its headlines

Yes, I agree. I think I will change the design to have a hierarchy.

> 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.

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.

Lynx wrapped in Docker:

https://github.com/jzombie/docker-lynx

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.)

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.

That's a great observation actually! They should've made the design do that automatically based on story ranking

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.

i think the nytimes landing page does a good job at looking and feeling like an analogue newspaper

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.

Yours is much better, exactly how I envisioned it to be

The other form of curation is place on the front page.

That's probably closer to the editors choice in the context of HN.

Looking at the code everything is absolutely positioned, I would have expected to get a newspaper like flow to use Multi-column Layout

Good point. Of course Helen Keller wouldn’t have been able to use this if she were alive today… Or could she have? Have you ever considered that Helen Keller was faking it all along? I mean think about it how can you read and write if you are deaf and blind??

I said "heh" out loud over this.

"let's bootstrap a whole OS to run a light weight html renderer" is just something we should all take a moment to marvel at.

Currently the 131M Buildings story shows the blog author picture and BIO instead of a summary of the actual story. Is this easily fixable or is it a tough problem.

I’ve been running https://dailypopulous.com/ for years which is basically this but for general news. It generates a static paper edition every 6 hours from the most popular news links on social media with archives of all previous editions available.

To be clear:

- "Whole OS" is a standard alpine image (4MB) with just lynx installed via standard alpine package. Plus a layer for Lynx itself and entrypoint.sh script.

So a very standardized way to run it, with reusable popular base image, decent backbone for delivering it to the public, with ability to easily mirror and/or cache (done by default) each layer. Currently base Alpine has 0 known vulnerabilities, which may not be 0 tomorrow, but it's still a marvel that it ever has such low number. New versions are available instantly after developer creates new public image, without the need for maintainer of a distribution to look at it. Meanwhile your main OS can live it's own life in his own pace, without interference.

It doesn't sound scary at all, if you really have a closer look.

I like that only shows 10 articles.

nice, reminds me using rss decades ago

It should work better now. I improved the prompt a bit to extract the main content.