The Hacker News platform operated by Y Combinator has been around for about 17 years now, and still looks like on it’s first day in February 2007. Friendly said: It’s time for a redesign that rethinks navigation and overall readability. With this project, we’re trying to understand how people actually use the site and what structure would benefit their reading habits.

The current state is basically a link list in terms of functionality. But we are not in the 2000s anymore and people deserve a better reading experience than having to load a new tab just to get a glimpse of what is happening on the linked site.

Structure

Everything on Hacker News is based on posted stories. Each story consists of three elements – the post itself, the linked website, and the ongoing discussion. All three are closely related, so you’ll often find yourself jumping back and forth between them. We have tried to simplify this by displaying all three at the same time. This way, you can browse trending stories, see the linked site directly embedded in our app, and even take a quick scroll through the discussion. The goal is to give you a quick overview of all the latest stories and linked sites without having to leave the site or open a bunch of new tabs.

Visual Style

Especially because of the embedded previews, the look of the site has to be visually reduced. We aimed for a simple but carefully crafted interface that would not overwhelm you, even if you had to look at it every day.

Chances are the Hacker News community might appreciate a dark mode. Of course we respect this preference. Especially if the linked website has a dark mode as well, it makes for a pleasant late night reading experience.

Text

As with any text-based news site, the first goal is to make the text pleasant to read. We have carefully chosen two fonts to ensure this and to give the site some personality. We use the beautiful Nice by Jan Fromm for all stories and usernames. The Source Sans by Paul D. Hunt serves as the font for all labels within the interface and for comments.

Another aspect of improving readability is to take advantage of the few formatting conventions that exist. We take the plain text typed by the user and provide the intended styling. We have implemented italics, lists, code blocks, and quotes. Let us know if we missed an important formatting convention.

Your Usage

Are you a user? We would love to hear from you how our site fits into your Hacker News reading habits. Feel free to send us an email.
You’ll find our app at hacknews.cool – we’d appreciate it if you’d give it a try.