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Show HN: I built a tech news aggregator that works the way my brain does

(deadstack.net)
142 points dreadsword | 8 comments | 23 Oct 25 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.988s | source | bottom

An honest to god, non-algorithmic reverse chrono list of tech news that passes my signal-to-noise tests, updated hourly.

A lightweight a page design as I've been able to keep; simple, clean, fast. No commercial features or aspirations - this is a passion project, something I've been fooling around with on and off for decades.

There's a "Top" view too with an LLM edited front page & summary, and categorized views for a large number of topics - see the Directory. A few more buried features to explore, but the fundamental use case is pop in, scan, exit - fast and concise.

Your feedback would be appreciated!

1. taftster ◴[23 Oct 25 19:33 UTC] No.45685935[source]▶
I'm not sure, something about the "Recent Stories Summary" section (first view) is hard to read. The spacing is wrong. And the blue font. Someone mentioned Garamond too.

It's creating a "wall of text" effect to me and I'm not able to quickly skim and allow my eye to catch the bits that are interesting to me.

As a comparison, the HN homepage is very accessible to me for skimming and finding things to click into (like this entry).

UI is often quite subjective, understood. But I can't really "scan" the first view fast enough. It's all blending together and causes extra processing on my mind.

replies(2): >>45686001 #>>45686041 #
2. dreadsword ◴[23 Oct 25 19:37 UTC] No.45686001[source]▶
I hear you - there's something to be done there. My initial thought was to stay as close to convention as I could (links are blue!), but as the RECENT list gets long, its definitely gets less scannable.

Thank you for the feedback!

replies(1): >>45686062 #
3. dreadsword ◴[23 Oct 25 19:40 UTC] No.45686041[source]▶
How about now? Story titles are still clickable links, but are black. Made the story count a link as well, and kept it blue as a visual cue.
replies(2): >>45686093 #>>45686463 #
4. taftster ◴[23 Oct 25 19:42 UTC] No.45686062[source]▶
I hear you about "links are blue" ... except when you are a link aggregator.

The links are blue design from early HTML was meant to highlight links in the context of a paragraph of prose, not a list of link items. "Blue" means something special about the text in the context of the text around it.

In this case, the blue font is distracting because the links are the content. You don't need the blue to help your links "stand out". Because the links are normal text, using a normal palette would be appropriate.

I don't mind some subtle clues that these are links. Underlines, slight grey text. Or even a subtle hover effect. Two cents.

5. taftster ◴[23 Oct 25 19:44 UTC] No.45686093[source]▶
Better, to be honest. Keep refining of course. But this is definitely more readable.

I admit that straight black is not quite the right answer either. A slightly toned down dark grey would be nice. And again, subjectively, I like how HN has a row of non-link smaller (lighter shaded) text under each listing, which I think plays nice for the white space between each item.

replies(1): >>45686329 #
6. bcrl ◴[23 Oct 25 20:02 UTC] No.45686329{3}[source]▶
Personally, I far prefer black over grey. Grey is really hard to read across a variety of lighting conditions and devices. The older you get, the more important contrast becomes.
replies(1): >>45687052 #
7. felideon ◴[23 Oct 25 20:13 UTC] No.45686463[source]▶
Some additional feedback:

There's no reason for both the story count and the story summary to be clickable. It's confusing because:

(a) It's not clear what the number in parentheses even means (until you click and infer)

(b) Separate links makes you think they lead to different pages

Also, echoing another comment, it's not really clear what "incoming" and "outgoing" stories mean. Maybe "new" vs. "stale"?

8. taftster ◴[23 Oct 25 20:59 UTC] No.45687052{4}[source]▶
Fair and good point. Sharp black bothers me, so just adding in a little hue is nice for my eyes. But that's me, of course.

Noting also that this text is #000000 black, per the CSS. Maybe the background color helps soften it a little? Like contrast white/black is hard on the eyes, but HN is not?