▲Love the summaries, I must say some stories I haven't considered interesting seeing them in the original HN view only caught my attention after my eyes landed on the summary.
At the same time, I very much dislike the layout. Masonry-style layouts, at least to me, feel more "artsy" than practical. Multiple rows being displayed at once, with the most crucial information being chaotically all over the place instead of arranged in a way that makes it easy to scan it with your eyes, make me feel like I'm bombarded with information. It's very hard to follow along and very easy to miss articles; almost anxiety-inducing, even. There's hardly any point to this on a website; it's not like you're wasting any paper.
I am almost certain this layout is generated by AI, because I vibe coded the exact same newspaper-like style weeks ago.
reply▲I thought it already had a site?
reply▲thrownthatway1 hour ago
[-] It doesn’t have a website, it has a motherfucking website.
And it’s fucking perfect.
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.
reply▲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!
reply▲Cool, but body font size is too small for comfortable reading!
reply▲Sounds like an authentic HN experience to me!
reply▲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.
Or have a button that makes the text left-aligned for easier reading.
reply▲Wowfunhappy4 hours ago
[-] I think that very much defeats the point of making it look like a newspaper.
reply▲Which might be fine? Since web pages are not newspaper sites one might say its just not the ideal way of presenting information.
reply▲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.
reply▲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!
reply▲I did increase it in the meanwhile from when that comment was posted.
reply▲An overridden `.newspaper-copy { font-size: 1rem; }` works well.
reply▲democracy50 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).
reply▲I like the concept, the grid and the design. but the small text description is hurting my eyes.
reply▲Just made it a bit bigger.
reply▲fumeux_fume3 hours ago
[-] Nice! Happy to see the site appearing as itself on the front page doesn't cause some crazy recursive crash :)
reply▲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).
reply▲Made it 3, try again perhaps. Changing to text-align: left really destroys the aesthetic though.
reply▲It could probably be helped a bit by enabling auto hyphenation, but ultimately browsers aren't optimized for typesetting narrow columns of text
reply▲Great idea, I'm trying this.
reply▲Cool, seems need some deduplication. Maybe when you turn to the new page, some items fall back.
reply▲It is possible. Will look into it.
reply▲Nice design, gives a cozy feeling similar to reading a newspaper
reply▲Would be cool to see different column layouts too!
reply▲Yea -- it could use votes to pick a hero article, or change summary length.
reply▲Why is the text one long paragraph? Makes it very hard to read?
reply▲Because I'm telling the AI "summarize it to one paragraph".
reply▲OK. Tell it not to!
The formatting, etc looks all nice, but it's not worth reading.
sillysaurusx1 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.
Nice try at trying to get me to read the friendly articles ;)
reply▲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
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
reply▲smartial_arts4 hours ago
[-] Previews are v slow to load for some reason
reply▲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.
reply▲hey that's pretty cool. I think I still prefer "distill HN" cleanliness though. What made you create this.
reply▲I didn’t make this lol; just something cool I’ve found
reply▲Is it just me or is there something slightly weird about scrolling? Maybe font or color. Im on mobile.
reply▲This page now contains itself.
reply▲Nice design, but I can't afford the $3.50 price of the cup of coffee, atm (◡︵◡)(◠‿◠)
reply▲this is now my new default for hackernews.
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