I’m so knackered, I haven’t slept a wink

(Check out Knacker Hues on netlify and see the code on Github).

Let me start out by saying that I hate Hacker News. Often, when I’m reading it, and I see a story that interests me personally, I have to brace myself before I read the comments. “These guys are all terrible techbros with the world’s worst opinions”, I’ll tell myself. “They’re just going to be mocking people who have feelings and saying things like ‘why don’t you just do X’ when someone is asking about Y”. But, I still read it. Why? I have occasionally learned some things from it. It’s a good place to get up to date quickly on what’s going on in the world of tech. You just have to understand that you shouldn’t go here to see what reasonable people are saying about politics, or diversity issues, or anything at all besides, I dunno, coding or startups.

So, having said that. The main reason is that it’s always refreshed with new content. There’s always something new to read. Soon, you learn to avoid any posts about El0n Mu5k.

One pretty famous thing about HN is that it’s not particularly mobile-friendly. There are a lot of alternate front ends. But my favorite is hn.premii.com. There are a lot of things I like about this one, but there are still some things I don’t like. The biggest one is that the app doesn’t really work like a real webpage. The main scrollable window of comments is a div that’s as tall as the browser window. That means, on mobile safari, if you want to scroll to the top of the page (by clicking the ‘status bar’), you can’t. You’re already there.

I thought I could improve on some things. So I made my own hacker news frontend. I called it Knacker Hues, I dunno, I guess it’s kind of like reversing the first letters of the two words (H & N) but not really. It doesn’t matter, this is just a stupid personal project, ok?