Hacker News front page as a site(thefrontpage.dev)
136 pointsby thatxliner7 hours ago30 comments
  • hk1337an hour ago
    I thought it already had a site?
    • thrownthatwayan hour ago
      It doesn’t have a website, it has a motherfucking website.

      And it’s fucking perfect.

  • est32 minutes ago
    I am almost certain this layout is generated by AI, because I vibe coded the exact same newspaper-like style weeks ago.
  • dave7an hour ago
    I love it! I discovered it'll switch to a 3 column view if I take the zoom to 200%, I'd maybe prefer it at less but it's a bit tricky to guess if that's true or not. Regardless, it's very nice. And infinite scroll for the hackernews feed is a bonus!
  • democracy24 minutes ago
    This is great )) maybe do random templates similar to newspapers (like photo on the left, photo on the right, one block full width, then 3 columns, etc).
  • ammar_x5 hours ago
    Cool, but body font size is too small for comfortable reading!
    • Retr0id5 hours ago
      Sounds like an authentic HN experience to me!
    • gblargg2 hours ago
      I whipped up a quick uBO rule to fix that (also makes meta-information lines readable):

          thefrontpage.dev##p.newspaper-copy:style(line-height: normal !important; font-size: 1rem !important;)
    thefrontpage.dev##p.article-meta:style(font-size: 1rem !important; font-weight: normal !important; letter-spacing: normal !important;)
      EDIT: changed to 1rem as someone else suggested
    • Wowfunhappy5 hours ago
      I agree, but I think it's that small because otherwise, the justified text results in ridiculous spacing.

      OP, consider reducing the number of columns from 4 to 3 (at least below very wide viewports), increasing the font size, and then also allowing hyphenation. I think the last will help a lot with the justification problem.

      • iamalizard4 hours ago
        Or have a button that makes the text left-aligned for easier reading.
        • Wowfunhappy4 hours ago
          I think that very much defeats the point of making it look like a newspaper.
          • entropie4 hours ago
            Which might be fine? Since web pages are not newspaper sites one might say its just not the ideal way of presenting information.
            • Wowfunhappy4 hours ago
              This entire submission is styled to look like a newspaper. If you just want information that's available at news.ycombinator.com.
    • throwawayAAUGGH4 hours ago
      OP, I love the font size as is, have multiple options if you're going to change things! Remember the users that loved things as they were!
      • stagas4 hours ago
        I did increase it in the meanwhile from when that comment was posted.
    • daviding4 hours ago
      An overridden `.newspaper-copy { font-size: 1rem; }` works well.
  • hspeiser2 hours ago
    The inception effect here is hilarious. Watching this get its own front page while the subtitle lags behind with the previous top posts is weirdly funny.
    • 2 hours ago
      undefined
  • jesse_dot_id2 hours ago
    Beautifully unusable
  • chrisgen194 hours ago
    I like the concept, the grid and the design. but the small text description is hurting my eyes.
    • stagas4 hours ago
      Just made it a bit bigger.
  • 4 hours ago
    undefined
  • fumeux_fume3 hours ago
    Nice! Happy to see the site appearing as itself on the front page doesn't cause some crazy recursive crash :)
  • MadrasTh0rn36 minutes ago
    This looks amazing!!!
  • 2 hours ago
    undefined
  • oefrha3 hours ago
    Using text-align: justify for questionable aesthetic purpose here really hurts readability, especially on a narrower viewport like the 1026px viewport of Safari with sidebar on an iPad Pro 12.9’’ (although it’s probably more of a problem of the four column layout on that specific narrow viewport; three should be better).
    • stagas3 hours ago
      Made it 3, try again perhaps. Changing to text-align: left really destroys the aesthetic though.
    • sheept3 hours ago
      It could probably be helped a bit by enabling auto hyphenation, but ultimately browsers aren't optimized for typesetting narrow columns of text
      • stagas3 hours ago
        Great idea, I'm trying this.
  • revv004 hours ago
    Cool, seems need some deduplication. Maybe when you turn to the new page, some items fall back.
    • stagas4 hours ago
      It is possible. Will look into it.
  • almyk3 hours ago
    Nice design, gives a cozy feeling similar to reading a newspaper
  • BeetleB4 hours ago
    Why is the text one long paragraph? Makes it very hard to read?
    • stagas4 hours ago
      Because I'm telling the AI "summarize it to one paragraph".
      • sillysaurusxan hour ago
        Could you explain in more detail how this works? Would it break for paywalled articles that HN links to? (Usually someone posts a workaround archive link in the comments, but your AI probably doesn’t account for that, right?)

        I’m writing something similar to Moltbook for HN where AIs browse HN’s front page and leave comments. But I wasn’t sure whether AIs could reliably browse an arbitrary website. (Paywalls would break it, as just one example.)

        But it seems like your AI works fine for all the sites. If you have time to explain, what exactly do you do to generate your summaries? Thanks!

        EDIT: I see that sometimes your summaries fail, e.g. “Ferrari Luce - Summary not available.” It looks like it fails because it’s a JS heavy site. But I was thinking a headless browser could take screenshots of the page and then feed the screenshots to AI. I’m not sure how practical that is to implement though.

      • BeetleB2 hours ago
        OK. Tell it not to!

        The formatting, etc looks all nice, but it's not worth reading.

  • wanoir6 hours ago
    Would be cool to see different column layouts too!
    • irq-15 hours ago
      Yea -- it could use votes to pick a hero article, or change summary length.
  • insin4 hours ago
    Nice try at trying to get me to read the friendly articles ;)
  • bijowo16764 hours ago
    looks lovely, but can you borrow text styling and typography from a modern media website like NYT WaPo or some other major news outlet?

    This would make it easier to read

  • anonu5 hours ago
    i love it. would be cool to get the date lookbacks too - like this https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-05-22
  • clacker-o-matic4 hours ago
    oh this is sick; i wonder where the curly bits at the top and bottom came from; based on the svg artifacts it looks converted from a raster
    • stagas4 hours ago
      Tricks of the trade :)
  • smartial_arts4 hours ago
    Previews are v slow to load for some reason
    • stagas4 hours ago
      Some of them are really large and I'm not resizing them or storing them, just proxying their og image directly. So they might be taking long to respond from the original source. Also getting hammerred by being in the front page.
  • 2 hours ago
    undefined
  • galsapir7 hours ago
    hey that's pretty cool. I think I still prefer "distill HN" cleanliness though. What made you create this.
    • thatxliner5 hours ago
      I didn’t make this lol; just something cool I’ve found
  • namrog844 hours ago
    Is it just me or is there something slightly weird about scrolling? Maybe font or color. Im on mobile.
  • sublinear4 hours ago
    This page now contains itself.
  • SilentM684 hours ago
    Nice design, but I can't afford the $3.50 price of the cup of coffee, atm (◡︵◡)(◠‿◠)
  • delichon7 hours ago
    Now do clay tablets.
  • himata41134 hours ago
    this is now my new default for hackernews.
  • youens2 hours ago
    [dead]