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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall Reception & Comparisons

  • Many find the concept cool and bookmark-worthy; some say they’d use it as a “slow-lane” HN reader, especially on tablets or e-ink.
  • Others prefer classic HN or simpler alternatives (e.g., text-heavy or hckrnews-like views).
  • Several note this kind of “HN as a newspaper” idea has appeared before (old apps, Hacker Monthly, prior HN newspaper projects).

Design, “Newspaper-ness” & Layout

  • Some expected a layout much closer to a real print newspaper: higher density, multiple headline sizes, stronger visual hierarchy, clearer sections, and curated “top” stories.
  • Current design is described as closer to a corporate blog; colors lead a few to say it looks like a funeral site.
  • Suggestions:
    • Size headlines by HN score and front-page rank.
    • Use proper column/masonry layout instead of absolute positioning.
    • Add topical sections and horizontal breaks to mimic print curation.
    • Offer denser layout options and customizable fonts/heading sizes.

Printing & Technical Issues

  • The “print” aspect is widely criticized: print CSS is broken, overlapping content, bad page breaks, and unusable media=print view.
  • Advice includes using CSS columns, break-inside properties, and avoiding JS-driven absolute layouts.
  • Some users successfully print to PDF only with manual tweaks (e.g., margins none, different workflows).

Personalization & Features

  • Likes/dislikes are stored in local storage; embeddings + cosine similarity + HN score drive personalized ranking.
  • Requests:
    • Keyword-based customization, filters (e.g., hide certain languages/topics), hide like/dislike buttons, and a true “remove story”/hide function.
    • Display comment counts; easier navigation to discussions and commenting.
    • Daily/weekly email or printable digest; PWA support; offline/ePub export.

Content Extraction, Images & Safety

  • Main content is extracted by sending HTML to GPT-4; markdown pre-processing reportedly improves results.
  • Some slugs pull boilerplate or security messages instead of article summaries.
  • Image behavior is contentious:
    • Grayscale look is liked by some; others want color or no images at all.
    • Animated GIFs are considered highly distracting; calls for “animate on hover” or disabling GIFs.
    • Concerns about poor or irrelevant hero images, auto-including external images, and potential abuse/XSS vectors; one XSS issue and image-selection problems were acknowledged and iterated on.

Reliability & Infrastructure

  • Site updates hourly; some see this as “on brand” for newspapers but worry about freshness.
  • Several users hit “Failed to load/fetch stories,” often due to adblockers or Pi-hole blocking resources; disabling them fixes it.
  • Operator mentions OpenAI embedding costs around $10/day and considers paid features to support it.