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Congrats and building and releasing something. I guess for reading things like this, I'm just a browser kind-of guy. But I still appreciate youre building a NATIVE app that's using around 85MB of working memory (according to my Activity Monotor), and not some Electron thing.

I'm probably just a anti-app guy, but I tried it out.

First thing I went to do was CMD-F to search for some strings in the comments section.

Actually, the real first thing I did, was click on the left-side article preview on the text that said "1 hr ago | 63 comments" thinking it'd navigate me to the comments. See, I like my native hyper-links.

I've never understood the concept of an app wrapper for a link aggregator (HN, reddit, etc). The whole goal is to provide links to external sources, and now I'm browsing the web in a limited web browser without all my extensions etc.

Am I missing some core concept here? Why would I want to browse the web in this app as opposed to a web browser?

As someone who used to use native RSS readers a ton back in the day, the limited web browser usually isn't a problem for just reading a few articles.

I like native apps for things, even link aggregators, because my I want to use my OS's native window management and app management instead of just shoving everything into a browser tab, of which I already have too many. Because then it's just CMD+Tab to Chrome, and then figure out which of the 20+ tabs I'm trying to get to instead of CMD+Tab directly to that specific app.

Anyway, just a bit of old man yelling at cloud but I've always disliked the proliferation of "web app all the things." Might as well not even use a desktop OS at this point and just have a full screen browser window and call it a day.

I'm trying to understand your position here. An app with it's own way to manage multiple browser windows is better, because you have too many tabs open in your browser. If you have multiple links open, the tab management is now a problem in your desktop app instead of the browser. If you don't, then you don't have to manage tabs anyway. What does this solve that a separate browser window doesn't, except not having any way to add extensions like ad blockers or tampermonkey scripts etc?

if you read HN a lot, then it makes sense to have have native app for it

you might not be aware of how how much power is at your fingertips on a Mac with a tool like Hammerspoon plus some other utilities

obviously you can bind the app with it's own shortcut without calling my entire browser, but I can move it to any part of any of my monitors easy with my one handed shortcuts: https://gist.github.com/pazimzadeh/b1c70f5f205d0b63264e7c021... you get the gist https://github.com/peterklijn/hammerspoon-shiftit

I guess you could make a web app or app clip but I think this is a cool project. would be good to have a theme engine.

Look at NetNewsWire how good a native app of this kind can be. NNW in particular has great shortcuts, like or opening links in the native browser, and read/unread functionality

I usually don't have multiple HN articles open at a time, but I can see how that would just be replacing one problem (too many browser tabs) for a worse problem (too many, now limited, browser tabs).

It's just nice to have HN as it's own app instead of just another tab in a single app. Same reason I use mail.app vs. webmail, native music app vs the web player, etc.

PWAs also solve the problem, more or less, but it is nice to have something native.

If you want to use your native window manager, why don’t you just disable tabs and have every link open a new browser window?

On MacOS that would be an amazing poor UX, cmd+tab works on Applications, not specific windows.

Switching windows within the same Application is cmd+` ; and only works on the current workspace.

> But I still appreciate youre building a NATIVE app that's using around 85MB of working memory (according to my Activity Monotor), and not some Electron thing.

Well, assuming you have a browser open anyway, you're still using more memory than if HN is running in another browser tab.

In fact, if every website that you use frequently had its own native app, that would use more memory than you're using now.

You should probably check that.

A fresh hackernews tab of this thread uses 150MiB (Sandboxed) in Chrome for me, and HN is a pretty lean site by all accounts.

In Firefox (Linux) it says 34MB.

Weird, I promise I am not lying.

https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/hn_tab_mem_usage.png

If you're looking for an alt frontend on the web (+PWA), check out https://hcker.news

There will be a way to do user actions like upvote/comment/favorite/flag soon.

Congrats on shipping!

Two things, does anyone else feel like 2017 was not 9 years ago and rather feels like it was just yesterday? I use a 2017 iMac running MacOS 13.7.8. It appears my hardware will not support any newer version of MacOS. For the most part, I haven't been too discouraged by this as I prefer older MacOS designs over the newer ones.

However, this is the second time in 2 days I've actually hit a wall in the Apple eco-system due to an older OS.

Last night I tried to build Ghostty to hack on a feature... it needs Xcode SDK 26 which isn't supported on Xcode 14 (latest version I'm able to install).

Now today, attempting to try this app out, I can't launch it due to being on too old of an OS.

It's really a shame because this iMac from 2017 is quite the capable machine. Absolutely no reason to upgrade it (from a hardware / performance standpoint).

Hey there! What OS version are you using? This app should run on Mac os 14 and later.

> I use a 2017 iMac running MacOS 13.7.8

Tangential piggy back: If you prefer CLI, here's a free and open source HN browser in terminal:

https://github.com/Aperocky/hnterminal

Install: `pipx install hnterminal`

I enjoy this one as it helps keep me mostly on task while goofing off.

Very nice. Commenting from it right now.

First feature request from me would be to adjust text size. I've start bumping up the default text size on all sites by one or two notches in the past year. Getting old, y'know. But also, as someone pointed out on a design blogpost a decade ago, why not make things easier to read. I didnt need it then, but I appreciate it now.

Really happy that I can run this on MacOS14 cause I've been locked out of some neat things people have built recently. Thanks for targetting older OSes. I'm not upgrading to the crap they've been putting out lately.

I'll be able to read details more later (getting ready for the job). Hope I didn't miss anything and comment about something that was already addressed. Congrats on shipping!

Just pushed an update allowing users to adjust text size

> I've start bumping up the default text size on all sites by one or two notches in the past year

I've been doing this too; at some point I should probably just change the scaling of my desktop as a whole. But I like my high resolution, multiple windows layout too much to do it yet!

There's always a compromise for me when adjusting scaling. UI doesn't scale correctly, bars get too big when I only want the text specifically to be increased, etc. I've settled on adjusting the text manually because at least that's user-adjustable.

Just pushed an update allowing users to adjust text size

Hey thank you! I will make sure to tackle text size in the next release.

> Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.

You're not kidding! That's actually the first thing I looked at in your Github Repo. It's annoying as I made a neovim gui and downloaded it from GH and couldn't run my own app until I dug into some hidden place in the Settings App. Definitely super helpful to see how it's done.

I'm digging the app too! As another commenter said it'd be cool to see the comments as native SwiftUI elements as well. :)

> Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.

If anyone wants to see another repo with this, we have it set up for Slippi (and various subprojects, like the Launcher): https://github.com/project-slippi/Ishiiruka

I'm thankful that it's largely a "once it's working, it rarely breaks". If it does break, it's usually because I have to sign in to the developer portal and accept some contract somewhere. Error messages in CI rarely indicate this is the case sadly.

Thank you so much! I well definitely see what I can do.

> Built-in ad blocking — a precompiled WKContentRuleList blocks 14 major ad networks (DoubleClick, Google Syndication, Criteo, Taboola, Outbrain, Amazon ads, etc.) right in the WebKit layer. No extensions needed. Toggleable in settings

This is a good start, but I think a better approach would be to piggyback off of ublock origin's lists. Hopefully less maintenance that way too.

> I think a better approach would be to piggyback off of ublock origin's lists

That won’t work. uBlock origin is licensed GPLv3 (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock), this code is MIT licensed (https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News).

Great point, thanks!

@IronsideXXVI, are you open to changing to gpl v3? Otherwise, there is probably a decent set of filter lists with an MIT license somewhere. The goal is for you to NOT become a filter list maintainer, and by piggybacking off an already respected set of lists, you'd build user trust in your adblocking.

I would recommend that changing to GPL just to gain better ad blocking, which is far from being a primary feature, is probably not the greatest idea if you care about licensing.

> which is far from being a primary feature,

I don't know that I agree. If the adblocking functionality has gaps, then I will likely not use it for reading stories, and if I'm already opening up HN in my browser w/ ublock origin, then I might as well stay there and comment. Reading the article may not be the 'primary feature', but strong adblocking does seem like table stakes.

Sweet, I will have a look. Thank you.

I love the idea but what keeps me in the browser is things like uBlock Origin + uMatrix + a bunch of other extensions that I know keep me safer. On top of that, Firefox has anti-fingerprinting.

I don't necessarily have a ready solution to offer, but these are the obstacles preventing someone like me from being able to use apps like this comfortably and safely, especially knowing we are entering a transitional period where new apps are being vibe-coded every day and formal verification has not yet caught up.

Even if a given app has had every line of code reviewed by a human, or has well-defined interfaces that allow for sloppier internal code, how do I know that without cracking it open myself or asking an agent to help me audit it?

Neat! One feature I'd love to see is to follow/block users. Like this Chrome extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-followblock/dkbn...

Great idea, thanks!

It is on my feature list for https://oj-hn.com as well.

I wonder how you think about trusting oj-hn as a vendor? The extension looks great.

I sympathize with the desire to release programs/code anonymously or semi-anonymously on the internet. I noticed you don't particularly tie the extension to any identity (unless I'm missing something).

Maybe extensions are more constrained than I realize. Specifically it looks like the manifest has "host_permissions: ['https://squeeze.oj-hn.com/*']," and then presumably the only leakable thing is private contact email or votes. Maybe the chrome api content of the tabs/history permissions also (seems silly for chrome not to scope that to the startUrls though?) Not 100% sure I'm understanding correctly though.

you're not wrong which is why i try to be transparent about it all on the homepage. good suggestion, i'll blurb myself, but i'm not looking for fame so i left that off. i just want the extension to speak for itself.

it is all open source and built by CI, including squeeze, which is just a few lines of a CF worker.

https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/

i'm also not anon and i have 16k karma here along with decades of history building open source that you're probably using on a daily basis without even knowing it (co-founder of java @ apache).

i also don't need money, so i won't ever sell this project to the highest bidder and i don't have plans or need to monetize it either. maybe add some ai features in the future that require you to put in your own api token. GPLv3 too, to prevent corporate takeover.

right now, it is just a ground up feature re-implementation of another popular HN extension that the author abandoned. i've done it with over 650 unit tests too, so it shouldn't be too buggy and stand the test of time.

up to you though. i use it daily. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ya, thank you, I recognize the history! The extension just seemed isolated from another identity. So I was wondering the thinking. I wish chrome let you scope the manifest/permissions on the user side more.

one other thing. the best thing you can do is just run it in a separate profile than the rest of your browsing. i don't do that myself, but it would be slightly more secure that way.

Separate profiles is perfect. Not sure why I haven't been doing this. The keyboard shortcuts are wonderful and enter to open the article is so optimistic! Thank you for dragging me across the finish line. Your extension is glorious.

Edit: I liked the j and noticed it even worked elsewhere (bestcomments is when I ran into it)! None of this is requests, just reflections. Still warming up to the keyboard navigating collapsed comments behavior. Also I think I remember the original HNMarkAllRead 'hide stories' checkbox hid stories after visiting comments. (And there was a hide comments checkbox that when marked only revealed new comments since the last visit) There are lots of workflow permutations to hn!

'j' to the end of the page to go to the next page is awesome. took a bunch of ai tweaking to get all that right.

i actually did this whole multi-layered object model to wrap around the dom to enable pagination more easily. took about 2 days of coding to figure that out. doing it that way made it so that you can even refresh the page and it will 'remember' where active article is. none of the other extensions are this well thought out.

oh and left arrow to open the comments is debatable, but i kind of like it. my reading pattern is to open a bunch of tabs... right/enter to open the story and then left to open the comments... then when i have time, i go through all the 'interesting' stories.

what i'd like to do is add kind of a bookmark and tag system so that you can store what you want to read later and be able to tag it so that you can search for it. favorites is close, but it doesn't quite cover the same use cases.

i've done my best to keep it as minimal as possible. i wish i didn't even need squeeze, but there was some block that required it and it was easier to just do it as a few lines of code. i figured as long as it is all built by CI, GPL and OSS, I'll get a pass. it is the best we can do today.

try it out, let me know what you think. i promise not to hack your hackernews.

My experience would indeed be so much better with a content filter I can control, yes.

Also would be nice to be able store notes or short blurbs about usernames that will show up in the app. Maybe as a tooltip?

I have been building a drop in replacement for SwiftUI that can render with different renderers (TUI for now and GTK/Adwaita very soon). This will be such an awesome demo use case for it.

Congratulations on getting this out!

Sounds really cool! I’d love to check it out.

No No. Don’t do that, don’t make it better and easy to use. I’m already addicted and spent more time than I should. Now, this app that I can keep it open all day!

Btw, can you allow me to set the font-family, font-size, etc. for the interface? I can’t even do the default `CMD + +` to zoom in.

> I’m already addicted and spent more time than I should.

noprocrast + maxvisit + minaway on https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Brajeshwar is your friend for this :)

> In my profile, what is noprocrast? - It's a way to help you prevent yourself from spending too much time on HN. If you turn it on you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Done. Trying this one out.

Just pushed an update allowing users to adjust text size

Yeah for sure!

Really nice work! But +1 to at least font zoom on HN comments.

For sure! Will tackle allowing users to adjust fonts in the next release.

Just pushed an update allowing users to adjust text size

as a stand alone app, i thought there would be at least some kind of an improvement in UI but its like a step back.

I enjoy it for browsing, switching between articles. Thought others may enjoy it so I open sourced it. To each their own. If you dont like it, no need to use it.

If my work PC was a Mac I'd give it a try!

One thing: I really like the colors of Hacker News. It feels weird to me when Hacker News is presented in other colors. If I were to use your app I'd want to change the color pallet back to what it looks like on HN.

> Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.

Yes, in a past life I shipped a Mac application. This aspect is always a little bit of black magic. I will say that the Windows installer situation was a lot worse, IMO.

THis is nice. Congrats on the launch!

Congrats on launching!

How is this superior to an RSS reader?

Nice work.

I think you should remove Claude as a contributor to your repo. It probably weaseled its way in on its own, I think it’s the developers job to talk about the tools they used not the tool company.

Thank you! I beleive that is from having claude debug some issues with the build pipeline on it’s own.

It does like to weasel in if you let it write a commit message, and even after rewriting and force pushing, it seems to hang around on the GitHub contributor list.

Looks really neat! Before I built Hacksy for iOS, I also contemplated building a macOS version for HN news.

Thank you! I’m going to check out Hacksy now!

This is really good and I can definitely see myself using it instead of visiting the website. One thing I think would make it even better is if the comments weren't a web-view/embed but used swiftUI to display them (similar to how some reddit clients look, for instance). Not sure how feasible that is, I can imagine it'd be more involved than the current implementation.

I'm a big fan of Swift (and SwiftUI), such a concise and elegant language. Beauty.

Also I appreciate how you made all backend calls just static functions which they always should be. People tend to overcomplicate these things and add a lot of boiler plate and unnecessary bureaucracy.

Going to try your app, thank you!

P.S. tried it, already miss the `threads` tab

I need to add this! Will work on that for the next release.

Nice. I would like a way to export my own comments.

Thank you for the MIT license, I’ll be able to add my own.

It also works on my fork of the old news server.

Nice! Can’t wait to see what you come up with.

It is great! Very native feel and it's quick too. I don't have to keep a Safari window open all the time...the ram usage of this app is around 10% of a Safari window with a single tab.

A font size setting would be nice, I found the font is a bit small.

Thanks for the feedback! I will prioritize working on allowing users to adjust the font.

Do we need this? I mean, isn't this what your browser is for?

If you don’t like it, no need to use it right?

This is so nice. The UX feels very smooth too - I love these kinds of native apps. Thank you!

Thank you so much, let me know if there's anything you feel needs tweaking or added.

Ah, this gives me 2002 vibes where coolest websites started to produce native clients for their websites so their users could read and comment offline.

This is sooo good.

WHAT? The client size is 2 megabytes? It can fit onto two floppy drives! Man, this is something. It's even more 2002 vibes! And I haven't installed it yet.

Bravo!

Great! I was just looking for a replacement for https://www.modernhn.com

This marketing tactics are wild... made me uninstall the extension.

ModernHN has so many bugs... for instance you cannot see the text of "Show HN" posts...

https://oj-hn.com

These tools have no sense on a highly chaning API which is the web. Email, Usenet and the like will have a fixed protocol for decades and will still work anywhere.

i would love keyboard-driven navigation! espeically for switching between the post and comments :)

I will add this.

crazy you built this thing in less than a week! did you use the claude code from CLI or via the macOS app to help with this? just kind of curious on your workflow!

Hahah yep. I prefer the claude code cli, it super charges the amount of work i’m able to do.

please add in the keyboard shortcuts to navigate, that's one of my favorite things about native desktop apps

I will look into this for the next release. Thanks for the idea!

Nice. It is actually very close to the experience I have via RSS on Reeder.

What does your CLAUDE.md look like?

I actually find it better not using one. I leave Claude.md blank.

really nice, but if you have high res monitor the fonts are too small. would be nice to zoom the ui

Just pushed an update allowing users to adjust text size

100%! Will have this fixed in the next release.

IOS next and you've nailed it!!

Absolutely, IOS version should be pretty simple. Going to iron out a few things in the Mac version that users are asking for, then bring it to IOS.

This is super cool.

In other similar news, I've been working on enhancing the HN ux, but still in the browser as an extension. The current build up on the Chrome store is pretty stable.

https://oj-hn.com

Oh sweet! I’ll make sure to check it out!

Some nice to haves: automatic paywall bypass for paid sites, and automatic cookie/pop-up rejection.

Why does the comments page look like a web view with some custom CSS? Is it because HN API doesn’t have a way to post comments? You could try using a WebPage[1] to inject the cookies and post comments, and an OutlineGroup to display comments.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/webpage

After playing around with it for a bit, one request I would like to make is being able to open multiple tabs.

Hey there! Try clicking view in the mac os nav bar, then click show tab bar. Is that what you’re looking for?

This is really really nice! Great work!

My only nitpick is I wish I could force dark mode on web pages with a light background, but that’s minor.

I mean, what's the point of this app? It looks exactly like the web version, without any improvements over the abysmal HN threading.

I enjoy it for browsing, switching between articles. Thought others may enjoy it so I open sourced it. To each their own.

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Looks nice but I don't have/want a Mac so I can't really use it. Support for other platforms would be nice.

Supposedly people are raving about Swift being cross-platform nowadays, this seems like a simple example where the Swifties can prove how useful/practical that is in practice.

Swift is de-facto cross-platform without limitations.

SwiftUI is something entirely different and not trying to be cross-platform at all.

Ok, so Swift-the-language is cross-platform, but can't actually do cross-platform UIs. So great for CLIs, bad for everything needing a GUI?

To some degree. There are _many_ SwiftUI clones that support other frameworks such as Gtk and Windows, with varying states of maturity. Or you can share the business logic and write the UI natively in Swift.