This is gorgeous. Makes me feel like I'm picking up an old news sheet. Forces me to read slowly from which I then enjoy the reading much more it's like difference of drinking a fine wine from a glass instead of a straw in the wine bottle.
The Front Page highlights a diverse set of tech and science stories"
It is interesting the summary it generated for itself wasn't able to describe itself as a Hacker News content view. It missed the big picture meta context.
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 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;)
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.
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.
It’s exceptional. Here in camp “userscripts can offer some improvements”, would necessarily not say perfect, but definitely amazing how it’s continuing to stand the test of time.
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!
You need some filler for the space at the bottom. Something like ads from the 1800's for quack medical devices or Radium Therapy. Maybe something wildly misogynistic advertising laudanum.
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).
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).
I agree that text-align: justify should be the way to go. Don't discard having a "config" menu in the header somehow to change this option along body text size as some other people might find it useful, which could then use localstorage to preserve the settings. Love the website by the way! I'm used to skim through brutalist.report in a daily basis but this one may be a worthy replacement :)
w/o instruction to avoid the same generic “this is an article about” preambles (or non-SotA model)
Not that summaries are reliable anyway. Big picture, maybe, but poor importance classification (bad at extracting key points). Understandable for this use case but unwilling to read potentially false summaries given risk I go around remembering them (never having read the original piece).
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.
The solutions to this don’t seem to be great for the web or polite to use. An industry exists to cheaply do it, but not very ethical and surely a massive ToS violator.
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.
Great job. Looks awesome.
This is gorgeous. Makes me feel like I'm picking up an old news sheet. Forces me to read slowly from which I then enjoy the reading much more it's like difference of drinking a fine wine from a glass instead of a straw in the wine bottle.
Kudos to the author.
I am almost certain this layout is generated by AI, because I vibe coded the exact same newspaper-like style weeks ago.
Yes ! Building a news website with Claude design give me the same design, background color, text size …
me too… this felt awkward: https://duobook.co/explore-stories
"Hacker News front page as a site
The Front Page highlights a diverse set of tech and science stories"
It is interesting the summary it generated for itself wasn't able to describe itself as a Hacker News content view. It missed the big picture meta context.
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.
Cool, but body font size is too small for comfortable reading!
Sounds like an authentic HN experience to me!
I whipped up a quick uBO rule to fix that (also makes meta-information lines readable):
EDIT: changed to 1rem as someone else suggestedI 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.
I think that very much defeats the point of making it look like a newspaper.
Which might be fine? Since web pages are not newspaper sites one might say its just not the ideal way of presenting information.
This entire submission is styled to look like a newspaper. If you just want information that's available at news.ycombinator.com.
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!
I did increase it in the meanwhile from when that comment was posted.
An overridden `.newspaper-copy { font-size: 1rem; }` works well.
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.
I can’t see this post on the news frontpage though
Screenshot - https://i.ibb.co/zTTK1hQR/IMG-6526.jpg
I thought it already had a site?
It doesn’t have a website, it has a motherfucking website.
And it’s fucking perfect.
It’s exceptional. Here in camp “userscripts can offer some improvements”, would necessarily not say perfect, but definitely amazing how it’s continuing to stand the test of time.
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!
You need some filler for the space at the bottom. Something like ads from the 1800's for quack medical devices or Radium Therapy. Maybe something wildly misogynistic advertising laudanum.
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).
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).
Made it 3, try again perhaps. Changing to text-align: left really destroys the aesthetic though.
I agree that text-align: justify should be the way to go. Don't discard having a "config" menu in the header somehow to change this option along body text size as some other people might find it useful, which could then use localstorage to preserve the settings. Love the website by the way! I'm used to skim through brutalist.report in a daily basis but this one may be a worthy replacement :)
It could probably be helped a bit by enabling auto hyphenation, but ultimately browsers aren't optimized for typesetting narrow columns of text
Great idea, I'm trying this.
Beautifully unusable
I like the concept, the grid and the design. but the small text description is hurting my eyes.
Just made it a bit bigger.
Nice! Happy to see the site appearing as itself on the front page doesn't cause some crazy recursive crash :)
Its like reading a newspaper of sorts.
Cool, seems need some deduplication. Maybe when you turn to the new page, some items fall back.
It is possible. Will look into it.
Would be cool to see different column layouts too!
Yea -- it could use votes to pick a hero article, or change summary length.
Nice design, gives a cozy feeling similar to reading a newspaper
i love it. would be cool to get the date lookbacks too - like this https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-05-22
Why is the text one long paragraph? Makes it very hard to read?
This was the natural length of a paragraph before the emergence of engagement driven microblogging.
Because I'm telling the AI "summarize it to one paragraph".
w/o instruction to avoid the same generic “this is an article about” preambles (or non-SotA model)
Not that summaries are reliable anyway. Big picture, maybe, but poor importance classification (bad at extracting key points). Understandable for this use case but unwilling to read potentially false summaries given risk I go around remembering them (never having read the original piece).
OK. Tell it not to!
The formatting, etc looks all nice, but it's not worth reading.
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.
The solutions to this don’t seem to be great for the web or polite to use. An industry exists to cheaply do it, but not very ethical and surely a massive ToS violator.
Nice try at trying to get me to read the friendly articles ;)
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
Tricks of the trade :)
Previews are v slow to load for some reason
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.
hey that's pretty cool. I think I still prefer "distill HN" cleanliness though. What made you create this.
I didn’t make this lol; just something cool I’ve found
This looks amazing!!!
Is it just me or is there something slightly weird about scrolling? Maybe font or color. Im on mobile.
This page now contains itself.
Nice design, but I can't afford the $3.50 price of the cup of coffee, atm (◡︵◡)(◠‿◠)
Now do clay tablets.
this is now my new default for hackernews.