Show HN: Hacker Times, a New York Times-inspired version of Hacker News
hackertimes.caI thought it would be fun to browse HN as if it were a newspaper. The site updates once an hour. Enjoy!
I thought it would be fun to browse HN as if it were a newspaper. The site updates once an hour. Enjoy!
I remember there was a similar project like this posted a while ago. Turns out there are multiple. Here are just a few (that are still online):
A couple of months ago (so probably vibe-coded too):
https://thefrontpage.dev/
https://times.hntrends.net/
https://hackernewstimes.com/
This one even from 6 years ago:
https://www.wolfgangfaust.com/project/paper-hn/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669650, 627 points, 133 comments)
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=hackernews+newspaper
No shame in doing something that already exists for yourself. But at this point I think it wouldn't be asked too much to just ask your favorite agent to check first if someone already implemented your idea in the past and then consider if your vision is really distinct enough to warrant anther instance of whatever you want to build.
Maybe that can happen through custom instructions. But I guess, by default the agent will happily do extra work and spend lots of tokens on “redundant” projects.
We're going to enter an era of fragmentation and silos like never imagined before. It'll be terribly wonderful, with everyone getting exactly what they want.
You're probably right, but i think this is a human-led issue, not one brought on by tech, though it does exacerbate it.
As someone committed to transdisciplinary work, I think the tech also really supports this - i can do lit reviews on topics and cross-reference much more easily, which gives me more time for reading and thinking (both of which are also falling out of fashion, but that's another story)
There is nothing particularly special about building something first.
True, but imo there's also nothing particulrarly special about telling your agent to (re)build something that already existed (in various flavours) before.
I packed the thought into "consider if your vision is really distinct enough": make it better, make it weird, or make it recreationally (i.e. by hand). Make it opinionated, in Minecraft, whatever, but give it at least some new substance.
It's also fine to do Hacker Tube or Hacker Times (it's really not about this specific instance) for the 100th time, but if nothing else distinguishes it from the others than "I wanted to have one too", maybe it's not the curiosity-inspiring thing to share on HN we should strive for.
None of these are listed in the guidelines on HN.
Nor was it implied. I agree with the poster, especially in the case of point-and-release agentic coding. Not saying it's to be banned if there's no additional substance, but worth asking yourself what you've contributed apart from token spend.
Subjective opinions. People can do whatever they want.
Yep, thank you simsla.
My specific examples aren't listed, but the guidelines on what to submit support my point I think:
> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
You seem to be confused. Every opinion on here is subjective, and no one was suggesting that the poster should be arrested.
I was merely pointing at how some people seems to have some impression that the idea should be original and not a duplicate as if it's some sort of objective truth that they have found out.
In reality it's just some false belief they have.
There is no guarantee that the first implementation of the idea will be the first to capture the attention of the public.
Also it's perfectly fine to have someone post a duplicate implementation of an idea and get no reception as well.
https://help.fivefilters.org/pdf-newspaper/screenshots.html#...
I actually liked https://thefrontpage.dev/
A shame that it broke a few weeks ago. These projects tends to get abandoned after a while.
It's been working fine for me most days. I came here from there just now.
Yup, I specifically only linked working sites, since not all I checked were online anymore.
HN keeps reinventing HN-flavored things.
I built this to aggregate all the aggregators (like HackerTube, Hackerbooks etc.) that were popular a few days ago (they go back to 2011, at least).
https://hackeragain.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
I was hoping the lists would start from a count of 0
wow quite a list - my version of it is https://thedailyfront.johnnys.page which I built for myself, to read it on my tablet on my way to the office. A new issue is generated automatically every morning. My goal was to have something that is self-contained with every article directly readable on the site and to have the discussion there as well
damn the vibecoded ones look a lot better
Is that all that surprising? We're comparing hobby projects created by a single developer, in a medium that requires multiple skills to master, to a machine generated site that can draw upon the collective knowledge of humanity. (I think that is a fair comparison here, since pretty much everything known about web development would be documented online.) Comparing it to a team of developers doing it professionally would likely lead to a different outcome.
I quite liked https://hackernewstimes.com because it let's you see the articles and HN comments in a split pane.
yeah but to be fair, those all just show posts with the same title. This one actually come up with pretty good headlines and summaries based on the articles themselves and I think actually are quite good for LLM-written content. It probably took some effort to get it to match NYT tone/style in writing and I found some of the headlines much better than the original ones though some of the charm of HN is titles that are unclear enough to make you go to the article only to find it's not about what you thought.
Might appreciate a print version of this mailed to my house :)
I find this new one to be the best to look at. Layout, design, fonts. I'm not sure about the content but feels good to my eye
Nice typography, reminds me of something I built earlier in the year.
Shameless plug: https://rnn.news/
> Masthead set in Manufacturing Consent
I like the description for Manufacturing Consent font:
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Manufacturing+Consent/abou...
https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/manufacturingc...
Reminds me of furniture descriptions in the Sims
While I like the premise, the opening text:
> Ah, Manufacturing Consent—the font that doesn’t just scream “serious journalism,” it calmly editorializes it in 144-point Fraktur while subtly nudging your worldview.
Unfortunately feels too much like an LLM output for me.
(Which is probably post-ironic in this context?)
Isn't what people pay for with the NYT or other publications, the journalism and editing? Like, the UI isn't why people pay for it.
Given that this seems to just be a re-skin, why a full site that updates hourly, instead of just a browser extension that rewrites the content in-place live?
Quoting the show hn introduction: "I thought it would be fun"
I think we can leave it at that no?
The instant value I got from this is actually something that resembles journalism and editing, even if it’s just an LLM doing the job: the rewriting of headlines along with a half-decent editorial summary paragraph gives me a clear overview of what each link is actually about without the usual puzzling over what the cryptic HN headline is trying to say.
Yeah. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321605 — what the hell is this? Why do people click on random links allegedly belonging to no name projects? What are these projects about? Fascinating.
Yes, but it's still nice to have a good UI. HN has many things that one can find inconvenient.
Can you create a rendered pdf version of this? Similar to https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/10/04/nytfrontpage/scan...
Then I can show it on my eink art board
Sure. I'm currently working through a list of feedback items that people shared here. I'll add that to the list.
Attempting to steal HN's thunder ? Knowing the NYT's, the ads and the Nag Screens will come shortly.
I personally don't like the AI-rephrased titles, they feel too editorialized and similar to each other. I realise AI-rephrasing is necessary for the description, but I think the title should (optionally?) be left alone. Could be a toggle.
Cool! This is great because it demonstrates how terrible NYTimes UI is on mobile, thanks!
Since we're sharing vibe coded news sites, here's another: https://headlinegator.com aggregates push notifications from various news apps to one single page.
Just my naive opinion, but HN's UI is so timeless. I love it, and I hope it never changes. I honestly can't imagine HN with a redesign.
I wouldn't mind a dark mode but otherwise agree. I do occasionally flashbang my baby by opening HN while he's asleep on me in the dark
I think I'd prefer NYT in Hackernews form
not sure, do the have comments & discussions?
Lot of people come just for comments
Curated or real-time? This is near real-time feed of latest stories:
https://donohoe.dev/timeswire/
Thanks all for your feedback!
I added a few of them to the site:
- Games and AI section - NYTimes style comment section
I don’t think the pay wall is working.
I was about to type this exactly!!
me too! does this say something about us or about the [T|t]imes?
On the plus side, I was able to cancel my subscription without a notarized letter!
This is great! Very readable and feels like a nice way to browse articles. I tend to gloss over stuff in the HN wall of text sometimes so this breaks the links up in a useful way. Nice job.
Yeah, it does make the stories a lot more readable, HN just has bullet points of links making it slightly hard to follow everything the only thing the site is missing is a games tab like the NY Times.
Neat. To-do: Give HN the ONION treatment? :-) https://theonion.com/
Was kinda filled with N-gate, but they stopped updating.
http://n-gate.com/
'twas a sad day when N-gate went quiet.
I did it for myself and not getting into the rabbit hole of HN, I called digestivo https://digest.ezcurdia.dev its the same concept but its fewer notes summarized
Fun. I have a visceral dislike for the NYT, so the association is actually a negative, haha — but I could get over it.
The tradeoff of the Hacker Times design is increased information for each story but lower density of stories compared to the HN homepage. The high-density design of the HN page is probably optimal for my habits, even though some of the user-submitted headlines are opaque enough that I miss some things I would otherwise click on.
The x-height of the article caption font is wrong and the body font is too wide.
PS. Hello from the former typophile.com ranks :)
This is dope, although nothing beats the nostalgia of browsing the original HN
This reminds me of an idea I had a while ago; it would be nice if I could receive a paper daily/weekly of interesting articles, updates in the world, think pieces, etc. that weren't as broad as daily news or as opinionated. Just things that people found interesting or things happening around us without the political bias (on either side).
The paper side would just be to anti-digitize my life more, feels like it would be almost like a paper RSS feed.
Not exactly what you’re asking for, but a big fan of Hacker Newsletter, which emails you top HN articles. What you’re asking for is a little utopian, HN is the closest thing I’ve found
>Hacker Newsletter, which emails you top HN articles.
have you read it recently? Is it still the authentic articles? (as opposed to ads for whatever you were browsing a few minutes earlier.)
Ha, as the guy who runs HNL I'm curious what you're reading that makes you feel like that?
It wasn't physical, but there was a slick app for the 1st gen of iPad called Early Edition which was basically just curated RSS feeds presented in the style of a newspaper. I was only able to find one image of it. I don't think the app exists anymore, unfortunately.
https://imgur.com/a/5sw6zOP
I found an archive of their app story entry with more screenshots, linked from the archive of the developer's site.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131020160134/https://itunes.ap...
Oh nice! I used it back on a first gen iPad in 2010 and the editorial-style layout meets curated RSS feeds was hard to beat.
Early versions of Instapaper had a nice way to push out a Kindle "magazine" with recently-captured articles that I loved. This was circa...2010, 2011? An age long past.
If you can track down some decent sources that you like (maybe something like Kagi News, https://www.positive.news/, a good local paper if you have one), you could with little effort vibe up a daily printout and have it waiting for you when you get up each day. For a fun version, there's plenty of cheap thermal printers on aliexpress and similar that'd give you a non-US Letter/A4 version so it doesn't feel like Yet Another Document.
You just described what Time magazine was.
Back when people still understood that they don't need to know about every single "breaking" news story on the planet the instant it happens.
For a couple of months, I took a digital news break. I only read one national paper on Sundays, and the local paper twice a week. Amazingly, I didn't burst into flames or get stranger dangered. I felt both calm and informed. I plan to resume that pattern after the election.
FOMO is the drug. The tech industry is the dealer.
Wow oh wow. There's a lot of wisdom in this post. Maybe not earthshattering, but a good perspective for me to chew on.
By analogy, my best market moves were when I checked market activity about once a week, irregularly. Once I made a big decision, I stuck with it by not checking the market for a while. Not saying that is right for everyone, or even for me all the time, but I did very well in the 2008 crash.
Kagi has a news site/app that updates once per day with the highlights from various categories of news.
I would imagine one could take something like that, and have program fetch it each morning, format it nicely, and print out a front page overview of what's going on. Just pick up the paper from the printer each morning.
This idea might be fine for a front page, but would fall apart when you start getting into long articles and think pieces. You'd be burning through a lot of paper.
I wanted exactly the same thing, so I built https://morningsift.com. You can use it to create your own daily newsletters from topics, specific websites, youtube channels, X accounts, etc. This is totally free. You can even create it as a daily podcast, but I had to charge for this option, as it can get expensive to run every day. If you give it a shot, I would love to get any feedback!
This is great. I really like how information is organized in newspaper format. Gives me enought to know whether i want to read it or not. Bookmarked!
I just want HN in dark mode....
I would be surprised if nobody already created a plugin for firefox/chrome that adds dark mode honestly
Dark Reader Mode for Firefox works well for me! ;)
>I just want HN in dark mode....
Dark Reader extension for Firefox, works on mobile and desktop. I constantly forget this setup and blinds myself when I access HN from elsewhere.
I use an alternative front end to Hacker News https://hn.premii.com
You can adjust the theme to your liking and I find it actually quite pleasant. No subscription, no login, mobile friendly and it has been stable and online for several years.
Here's a JS bookmarklet I use to apply dark mode to any website. It tries to preserve colors and avoids inverting graphics. Add a new bookmark to your toolbar and paste in that JS in place of the link. I hope you find it useful!
https://gist.github.com/mpetrovich/b3e4ec291d21bbdbe17b1adf4...
I'm liking all of the remixes.
We built a combined books/video version as well in our app library.
https://medium.com/@vektormemory/vektor-2-0-4-hacker-news-bo...
At least on mobile, the format is much more reminiscent of slashdot.
Man, what a tragic waste of a great .com era community. The whole community self-moderation thing worked ok before the more worthwhile people left. Now they can’t even be arsed to pop by once an hour to remove the multi-page swastika ascii art comments.
It had too high of an influence to integrity ratio, and got infiltrated by motivated actors. That is not an uncommon dynamic. Every democratic forum kind of medium with significance becomes a target for career propagandists and con artists and so on.
This is going to be the “Hello, world” of the AI era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello,_world
This is so cool! Definitely liked the title font :)
I do wonder if this kind of republishing is compliant with the original site? As in, if one can store the content vs. not and just lazily convert live - have been curious about the copyright rules & practices in this area.
wow this is revolutionary. it could change hn forever if folks would start reading at least one paragraph past the submission title before jumping into discussion.
Amazing project! I can finally breath!
If I cancel can I get the service for $1/week? That's my favorite NYT feature.
This is cool. I built an HN reader recently too - this one is inspired by the old Apollo for Reddit app on iOS:
https://hnollo.com/
That’s cool. Loved Apollo
Do people remember Hacker monthly? It was a print magazine of top monthly articles. Great project, unfortunately discontinued in 2016
Needs a better title font for headlines.
Georgia Bold is not fit for the purpose, and there's no earthly reason to use it at 55px.
There are so many good serif fonts to choose from on Google Fonts. An embarrassment of riches.
Yeah, the typography choices here are poor. Nice idea but readability on mobile isn’t great sadly.
Just took a look out of curiosity. Zero is an insignificantly reduced version of lcase alphabetic 'o'.
Fonts that don't distinguish between 0 and O/o are abominations before God and all that is good in life.
HN being ugly is intentional. It actually does not need these facelifts, because its plain appearance serves as an important filtering function for who participates.
Somehow this particular formulation makes me scream internally. It's not the classic print edition of the NYT that everybody grew up with, it's the click-maxing online version...
For me I’m thinking about the postmodern pastiche of it, as in Jameson’s Late Capitalism, wherein the NYT (while in many ways not a fair and trustworthy entity) earns its credibility through the measure it takes of risk before publication— this project would reproduce the aesthetic identity of such carefulness without actually containing it.
Archive link?
Well done.
Just for your information, if you care about the reachability of your project: this site, like all ChatGPT sites, is blocked in countries that are banned by ChatGPT (e.g., Hong Kong). And because it uses a custom domain, it cannot be automatically proxied as I have set up for ChatGPT domains, which is slightly annoying.
Guess I missed ChatGPT sites, I presume it's exactly what I envision, you can make an accessible website with ChatGPT? If so, how do you know this is one?
Because when i opened it, it says
"Sorry, you have been blocked
You are unable to access chatgpt.site"
Very well done. I like the categories at the top.
Love this version
Certificate issue, Firefox refuses to load it.
so hacker tube, hacker books and now hacker times. what's next? hacker food?
Hold my hacker beer...
pschorr thing, no problem
HackerHackerNews, a collection of the best Hacker News comments that were recommended by comments on Hacker News.
Hacker food already well defined in 1995 by Razor and Blade - clearly jolt cola :)
Source: https://youtu.be/O7AKquUtTvs?is=MJjR5eF9UY_JAo12
The problem ofcourse is when your measure becomes a target, it stops being a measure, and all that.
Hackertv.org
Having the paragraph under the title reminds me of slashdot.org.
i'm open to the idea that its the NYTimes that needs a HN inspired version
Here ya go:
https://www.nytimes.com/rss
Click here for this one weird trick…
But honestly, the headlines there are refreshing
What about the ads, the tracking, the pop-ups and the limited-time special offers?
Hey Wenhao, saw CheapGPT on Show HN cool build! Quick security heads up, found small prompt leak. Can I send 1 page fix?
Unrealistic, I didn't immediately get hit by a paywall
Next is Hacker X :)
>Next is Hacker X :)
Please don't :(
/s Please do! Who knows what will stick when you throw it at the wall?
It's cool that you made something, but I don't like this.
Hackertube? NYTimes Hackernews? HackerBooks?
What a time to be alive ...
Still waiting for Doom running on HackerNews or Doom-inspired HN ...
I would like a printed copy, delivered please. Where do I sign up?
That looks so convincing, I was expecting the paywall popup to appear any second...
NYT but without the annoying google login, or subscribe for $1 paywalls! And I don't need someone linking to archive.is everywhere.
OH. I thought you meant HN but with paid subscriptions. Disappointed.
Work in progress. Getting the "Impossible to Cancel" stuff right is surprisingly difficult.
PTSD from clicking NYT links made me expect a paywall
Love this.
It would be more realistic if it was just a paywall.
Wait a bit! Where is a paywall?
HN reminds me a lot of Instagram.
People complain about AI generated content, then proceeds to give a dancing cat AI reel 1 million likes.
People here complain about vibe coded apps, then proceed to upvote this to the front page.
It's almost as if there are different groups that have different views and upvote different things.
washedup is right, of course, that the community is many people with many views (though the point should be made less snarkily). Of course HN disagrees with itself; it's not a self to begin with.
I think there's another factor: it takes time to find the best ways of using such new tools. The community is working this out slowly (as is society generally) and it is naturally a lagging phenomenon.
Seeing generated sites like OP and karpathy's HackerTube (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510) which look good and don't have the obvious-LLM sameiness that so many others do, is an interesting step along this way. It's also refreshing. There's no intrinsic reason why generated software should look bad or work poorly.
My point is that people will complain about GenAI but they actually love/enjoy AI generated content or projects as long as they fit what they're looking for.
Goomba.
It's not about the tools.
I also regularly complain about AI generated content. I do that mostly, because it's often either
- extremely uninspired design and UX wise (e.g. the classical beige/serif AI slop website),
- full of obvious and stupid mistakes (e.g. those shitty infographics on social media),
- just mimics the real thing, but misses the actual purpose (e.g. again those shitty infographics on social media)
- or is ridiculously overloaded with features and documentation (e.g. many AI generated software tools on GitHub)
That's repelling to me, because it screams that the human behind it is himself lazy and uninspired. It's bland, overloaded or full of mistakes, because raw output is a commodity.
It feels like a waste of time to even consume something, that the author or developer wasn't willing to put actual effort and thought into.
But that's an artefact of how the author is using the tool and presenting the results.
It's not an inherent property of AI use itself. HackerTimes for example doesn't feel uninspired or bland. And i like it.
add an AI section that is filtered out of technology and you'd have yourself a nice way to browse HN.
i'm pretty happy with the existing way of browsing HN. i hope it never changes.