Show HN: Hacker News frontpage as a print newspaper that you can personalize

nimbusega | 265 points

This doesn't look like a print newspaper. Print newspapers are much denser (in general) and have different headline sizes to emphasize the editor's choice of stories. This looks like a corporate blog home page or something. Some people will like this presentation; I'm pretty happy with HN as it is. But congratulations on shipping!

jgrahamc | 10 hours ago

Looks super neat! I've had a longtime dream of working on a similar project, but I want to make it "Daily Prophet" styled, inspired by the Harry Potter series - https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Daily_Prophet?file=Daily.... With gifs and effects :)

A few years ago, a similar project was posted on HN that I thought was really cool too - E Ink smart screen puts a newspaper on your wall (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323).

pncnmnp | 6 hours ago

All I get is "Failed to load stories," am I doing something wrong? Is there something I need to configure before things will load?

All4All | 7 hours ago

I made this to experiment with embeddings and explore how different ways of displaying information affect your perception.

It gets the top 100 stories, sends their html to GPT-4 to extract the main content (this was not producing good enough results with html parsing) and then gets an embedding using the title and content.

Likes/dislikes are stored in local storage and compared against all stories using cosine similarity to find the most relevant stories.

It costs about $10/day to run. I was thinking of offering additional value for a small subscription. Maybe more pages of the newspaper, full story content/comments, a weekly digest or ePub export or something?

nimbusega | 8 hours ago

I liked this for two seconds; then all the pictures loaded in the browser window, and its usefulness to me plummeted. Similar to other commenters, I actually prefer text-only in this context; in particular, the first picture displayed just now was animated, and incredibly distracting.

I would probably use this or at least play with it extensively if not for this "feature." I find that, unlike "real" newspapers, leading images in blog posts and even much larger sites are frequently a net negative (a trend greatly worsened with the advent of AI image generators).

eigenhombre | 4 hours ago

I would pay money, $1+ postage to maybe $5 + postage to physically print out tweet streams and other articles and mail them to some old people I know.

I'm thinking specifically of DieWorkwear on twitter, but others too.

paddy_m | 5 hours ago

This is pretty cool, it’s nice to have a clean interface that puts more focus on individual posts (as articles here) rather than tons of headlines where I feel I skim over posts a lot more (particularly the post about Jupiter only caught my attention on your site, not the front page).

I’d like if there was some support for customising it without liking and disliking so I could push topics I’m interested in first (e.g. those tagged with emacs). It would also be nice to hide the like and dislike buttons in general as it gives more of a social media feel that the newspaper style UI does well to shake.

fdphoughton | 10 hours ago

Anyone remember "Hacker Monthly"? Years ago it was a monthly PDF with nicely laid out copies of popular articles that had been highly voted on here.

billpg | 9 hours ago

Pretty cool. Like how the animated GIFs will play and the type and whitespace balance is pretty solid. Ever seen Paper-HN? A similar idea: https://www.wolfgangfaust.com/project/paper-hn/ - A fun detail that one has is when you mouseover their photos they go to colour.

bobhak | 2 hours ago

Nice! I recently worked on a chrome extension that personalizes the frontpage based on embeddings.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-explorer/amiaaon...

mahin | 9 hours ago

This is very nice! If you - make it a pwa/web clip - link to the discussions - make the images colored again I’d use it over the regular hacker news ui any day. I know your use case is printing it out, but it’s fantastic for usage on a tablet.

pflenker | 9 hours ago

I'm getting the an error of "Failed to fetch stories"

The console error is: (index):464 Error loading stories: TypeError: Failed to construct 'URL': Invalid URL at (index):482:36 at Array.forEach (<anonymous>) at NewspaperApp.displayStories ((index):471:25) at NewspaperApp.loadStories ((index):461:26) at async NewspaperApp.initialize ((index):418:17)

Can anyone help? I really want to use this product it seems great.

SamCoding | 7 hours ago

Looks really great, did you document the process or background of the project somewhere? I would love to read the journey!

3abiton | 3 hours ago

Good attempt but from the title I thought it would look like an actual print news paper

cryptozeus | 10 hours ago

This is excellent! I've been using it all day. I do wish it was a bit denser (similar to Drudge Report), but the product is neat enough as is. Congrats!

belmead | 4 hours ago

I guess you mean a digital newspaper with a layout inspired by print newspapers. It's definitely not a print newspaper, I know because I tried folding it in half to read on the train, and all that happened was my laptop screen broke.

karaterobot | 7 hours ago

For those who prefer scrolling to reading I guess.

istillwritecode | 10 hours ago

It’s funny how frequently people try to reinvent the wheel re: how this site is laid out. It’s the best part about it!

ideasphere | 6 hours ago

There was an iOS app from practically a decade ago that did something very similar, but you could customize with RSS feeds, and it would turn it into a traditional looking newspaper.

Sadly, I can't remember the name of it but it was pretty great.

vunderba | 10 hours ago

Is there a reason you chose not to display the comment count?

KerryJones | 4 hours ago

Very cool! Looks like it has an XSS vector though :P

https://i.imgur.com/5bbKiFc.png

nightpool | 10 hours ago

Amazing..and you're telling me you made this with less than 600 programmers?

ilaksh | 8 hours ago

Sadly the media="print" view does not provide usable output.

banga | 8 hours ago

Very cool, seems like it updates on a delay though, which will probably kill usability.

This post is not even on it.

frabjoused | 10 hours ago

This is super cool

ionwake | 3 hours ago

The images in the website are in grayscale.

creative72 | 9 hours ago

Looks like the NYT

hakube | 9 hours ago

Love this project! I would love to collab, please consider open-sourcing this project, or let me know if I can contribute in some way

syndicatedjelly | 9 hours ago

This is nice, but I prefer the simpler style of hckrnews.com

berbec | 10 hours ago