96 pointsby IronsideXXVI3 hours ago27 comments
  • taude2 hours ago
    Congrats and building and releasing something. I guess for reading things like this, I'm just a browser kind-of guy. But I still appreciate youre building a NATIVE app that's using around 85MB of working memory (according to my Activity Monotor), and not some Electron thing.

    I'm probably just a anti-app guy, but I tried it out.

    First thing I went to do was CMD-F to search for some strings in the comments section.

    Actually, the real first thing I did, was click on the left-side article preview on the text that said "1 hr ago | 63 comments" thinking it'd navigate me to the comments. See, I like my native hyper-links.

    • luma38 minutes ago
      I've never understood the concept of an app wrapper for a link aggregator (HN, reddit, etc). The whole goal is to provide links to external sources, and now I'm browsing the web in a limited web browser without all my extensions etc.

      Am I missing some core concept here? Why would I want to browse the web in this app as opposed to a web browser?

      • thewebguyd12 minutes ago
        As someone who used to use native RSS readers a ton back in the day, the limited web browser usually isn't a problem for just reading a few articles.

        I like native apps for things, even link aggregators, because my I want to use my OS's native window management and app management instead of just shoving everything into a browser tab, of which I already have too many. Because then it's just CMD+Tab to Chrome, and then figure out which of the 20+ tabs I'm trying to get to instead of CMD+Tab directly to that specific app.

        Anyway, just a bit of old man yelling at cloud but I've always disliked the proliferation of "web app all the things." Might as well not even use a desktop OS at this point and just have a full screen browser window and call it a day.

        • luma6 minutes ago
          I'm trying to understand your position here. An app with it's own way to manage multiple browser windows is better, because you have too many tabs open in your browser. If you have multiple links open, the tab management is now a problem in your desktop app instead of the browser. If you don't, then you don't have to manage tabs anyway. What does this solve that a separate browser window doesn't, except not having any way to add extensions like ad blockers or tampermonkey scripts etc?
    • postalcoderan hour ago
      If you're looking for an alt frontend on the web (+PWA), check out https://hcker.news

      There will be a way to do user actions like upvote/comment/favorite/flag soon.

  • Aperocky15 minutes ago
    Tangential piggy back: If you prefer CLI, here's a free and open source HN browser in terminal:

    https://github.com/Aperocky/hnterminal

    Install: `pipx install hnterminal`

  • alsetmusic2 hours ago
    Very nice. Commenting from it right now.

    First feature request from me would be to adjust text size. I've start bumping up the default text size on all sites by one or two notches in the past year. Getting old, y'know. But also, as someone pointed out on a design blogpost a decade ago, why not make things easier to read. I didnt need it then, but I appreciate it now.

    Really happy that I can run this on MacOS14 cause I've been locked out of some neat things people have built recently. Thanks for targetting older OSes. I'm not upgrading to the crap they've been putting out lately.

    I'll be able to read details more later (getting ready for the job). Hope I didn't miss anything and comment about something that was already addressed. Congrats on shipping!

    • presbyterianan hour ago
      > I've start bumping up the default text size on all sites by one or two notches in the past year

      I've been doing this too; at some point I should probably just change the scaling of my desktop as a whole. But I like my high resolution, multiple windows layout too much to do it yet!

  • navanchauhanan hour ago
    I have been building a drop in replacement for SwiftUI that can render with different renderers (TUI for now and GTK/Adwaita very soon). This will be such an awesome demo use case for it.

    Congratulations on getting this out!

  • Octoth0rpe3 hours ago
    > Built-in ad blocking — a precompiled WKContentRuleList blocks 14 major ad networks (DoubleClick, Google Syndication, Criteo, Taboola, Outbrain, Amazon ads, etc.) right in the WebKit layer. No extensions needed. Toggleable in settings

    This is a good start, but I think a better approach would be to piggyback off of ublock origin's lists. Hopefully less maintenance that way too.

    • Someone2 hours ago
      > I think a better approach would be to piggyback off of ublock origin's lists

      That won’t work. uBlock origin is licensed GPLv3 (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock), this code is MIT licensed (https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News).

      • Octoth0rpe2 hours ago
        Great point, thanks!

        @IronsideXXVI, are you open to changing to gpl v3? Otherwise, there is probably a decent set of filter lists with an MIT license somewhere. The goal is for you to NOT become a filter list maintainer, and by piggybacking off an already respected set of lists, you'd build user trust in your adblocking.

        • agg23an hour ago
          I would recommend that changing to GPL just to gain better ad blocking, which is far from being a primary feature, is probably not the greatest idea if you care about licensing.
    • IronsideXXVI2 hours ago
      Sweet, I will have a look. Thank you.
      • soulofmischief2 hours ago
        I love the idea but what keeps me in the browser is things like uBlock Origin + uMatrix + a bunch of other extensions that I know keep me safer. On top of that, Firefox has anti-fingerprinting.

        I don't necessarily have a ready solution to offer, but these are the obstacles preventing someone like me from being able to use apps like this comfortably and safely, especially knowing we are entering a transitional period where new apps are being vibe-coded every day and formal verification has not yet caught up.

        Even if a given app has had every line of code reviewed by a human, or has well-defined interfaces that allow for sloppier internal code, how do I know that without cracking it open myself or asking an agent to help me audit it?

  • putlake3 hours ago
    Neat! One feature I'd love to see is to follow/block users. Like this Chrome extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-followblock/dkbn...
    • latchkeyan hour ago
      It is on my feature list for https://oj-hn.com as well.
    • IronsideXXVI3 hours ago
      Great idea, thanks!
    • busterarm2 hours ago
      My experience would indeed be so much better with a content filter I can control, yes.

      Also would be nice to be able store notes or short blurbs about usernames that will show up in the app. Maybe as a tooltip?

  • jovantho2 hours ago
    This is really good and I can definitely see myself using it instead of visiting the website. One thing I think would make it even better is if the comments weren't a web-view/embed but used swiftUI to display them (similar to how some reddit clients look, for instance). Not sure how feasible that is, I can imagine it'd be more involved than the current implementation.
  • Brajeshwar3 hours ago
    No No. Don’t do that, don’t make it better and easy to use. I’m already addicted and spent more time than I should. Now, this app that I can keep it open all day!

    Btw, can you allow me to set the font-family, font-size, etc. for the interface? I can’t even do the default `CMD + +` to zoom in.

    • embedding-shape2 hours ago
      > I’m already addicted and spent more time than I should.

      noprocrast + maxvisit + minaway on https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Brajeshwar is your friend for this :)

      > In my profile, what is noprocrast? - It's a way to help you prevent yourself from spending too much time on HN. If you turn it on you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

      • Brajeshwar19 minutes ago
        Done. Trying this one out.
    • IronsideXXVI3 hours ago
      Yeah for sure!
      • gedyan hour ago
        Really nice work! But +1 to at least font zoom on HN comments.
  • gwbas1c2 hours ago
    If my work PC was a Mac I'd give it a try!

    One thing: I really like the colors of Hacker News. It feels weird to me when Hacker News is presented in other colors. If I were to use your app I'd want to change the color pallet back to what it looks like on HN.

    > Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.

    Yes, in a past life I shipped a Mac application. This aspect is always a little bit of black magic. I will say that the Windows installer situation was a lot worse, IMO.

  • mojuba3 hours ago
    I'm a big fan of Swift (and SwiftUI), such a concise and elegant language. Beauty.

    Also I appreciate how you made all backend calls just static functions which they always should be. People tend to overcomplicate these things and add a lot of boiler plate and unnecessary bureaucracy.

    Going to try your app, thank you!

    P.S. tried it, already miss the `threads` tab

  • rickknowltonan hour ago
    crazy you built this thing in less than a week! did you use the claude code from CLI or via the macOS app to help with this? just kind of curious on your workflow!
  • aquir2 hours ago
    It is great! Very native feel and it's quick too. I don't have to keep a Safari window open all the time...the ram usage of this app is around 10% of a Safari window with a single tab.

    A font size setting would be nice, I found the font is a bit small.

    • IronsideXXVI2 hours ago
      Thanks for the feedback! I will prioritize working on allowing users to adjust the font.
  • IFC_LLC2 hours ago
    Ah, this gives me 2002 vibes where coolest websites started to produce native clients for their websites so their users could read and comment offline.

    This is sooo good.

    • IFC_LLC2 hours ago
      WHAT? The client size is 2 megabytes? It can fit onto two floppy drives! Man, this is something. It's even more 2002 vibes! And I haven't installed it yet.

      Bravo!

  • albertonoys2 hours ago
    Great! I was just looking for a replacement for https://www.modernhn.com
    • ibdf2 hours ago
      This marketing tactics are wild... made me uninstall the extension.
    • oulipo2an hour ago
      ModernHN has so many bugs... for instance you cannot see the text of "Show HN" posts...
  • acquire93953 hours ago
    i would love keyboard-driven navigation! espeically for switching between the post and comments :)
  • latchkeyan hour ago
    This is super cool.

    In other similar news, I've been working on enhancing the HN ux, but still in the browser as an extension. The current build up on the Chrome store is pretty stable.

    https://oj-hn.com

  • manlymuppet32 minutes ago
    Some nice to haves: automatic paywall bypass for paid sites, and automatic cookie/pop-up rejection.
  • rcarmo3 hours ago
    Nice. It is actually very close to the experience I have via RSS on Reeder.
  • aoyama1chome2 hours ago
    What does your CLAUDE.md look like?
  • yawniek2 hours ago
    really nice, but if you have high res monitor the fonts are too small. would be nice to zoom the ui
  • wegoagain_dev2 hours ago
    IOS next and you've nailed it!!
    • IronsideXXVI2 hours ago
      Absolutely, IOS version should be pretty simple. Going to iron out a few things in the Mac version that users are asking for, then bring it to IOS.
  • marxisttemp2 hours ago
    Why does the comments page look like a web view with some custom CSS? Is it because HN API doesn’t have a way to post comments? You could try using a WebPage[1] to inject the cookies and post comments, and an OutlineGroup to display comments.

    [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/webpage

  • stalfosknight2 hours ago
    After playing around with it for a bit, one request I would like to make is being able to open multiple tabs.
  • stalfosknight2 hours ago
    This is really really nice! Great work!

    My only nitpick is I wish I could force dark mode on web pages with a light background, but that’s minor.

  • ranger_danger3 hours ago
    Looks nice but I don't have/want a Mac so I can't really use it. Support for other platforms would be nice.
    • embedding-shape2 hours ago
      Supposedly people are raving about Swift being cross-platform nowadays, this seems like a simple example where the Swifties can prove how useful/practical that is in practice.
      • blazarquasar2 hours ago
        Swift is de-facto cross-platform without limitations.

        SwiftUI is something entirely different and not trying to be cross-platform at all.

        • embedding-shape2 hours ago
          Ok, so Swift-the-language is cross-platform, but can't actually do cross-platform UIs. So great for CLIs, bad for everything needing a GUI?
  • genie3io2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • acheilies2 hours ago
    [dead]