www.read.hn

A simple, fast, and accessible Hacker News top stories reader.

• Shows the top 25 links from Hacker News
• Opens stories in Instapaper (free and great for reading stories on both mobile and desktop)
• Supports keyboard navigation
• Shows clearly which stories you've already read
• Accessible to screen readers and people with low-vision
• Gets refreshed every ~5 minutes
• Runs over HTTPS

Why do stories open in Instapaper?

Stories open in Instapaper and look something like this:

Why use Instapaper?

1. It’s free – Create an account.
2. It comes with a great reading experience: large text (useful when reading while walking), good typography settings, night mode…
3. It provides a cross-device “Read Later” functionality (very useful when an article is interesting but will require your full attention later).
4. A lot of stories posted on Hacker News aren’t optimized for mobile, are slow, and come with a lot of ads. Instpaper strips that out and only keeps the content. It’s faster, works on mobile, and is less tiring since all articles look the same.
5. Browsing read.hn & Instapaper feels like a unified experience when your Instapaper settings look like this:

Note: you can still access the original stories by clicking the domain name below each story title.

Keyboard navigation

• ↓ ↑ next / previous story
• ⏎ read story on Instapaper (more accessible and readable than most sites)
• alt + ⏎ read story on original site
• c open the comments

Contributing

Discuss changes in an issue

If you’d like to suggest a change or adding a feature, it is recommended to open a GitHub issue and discuss it beforehand.

Run the project locally

1. Create a fork of this repository
2. Clone the repository on your machine
3. cd into the directory
4. run yarn install
5. run yarn run dev

Make changes, open a pull request

Commit your changes in a clear an concise manner, then push your changes and open a pull request.

Deploy to Heroku

Deploy your own Hacker News reader for free to Heroku in only 2 clicks.