How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Ha, mine's weirder, I think? I wrote a React-like renderer in Lua that renders into Neovim buffers[1], then built a pile of apps on top, including an (unfinished/experimental) HN reader[2].
How do you keep the cursor and extmarks stable on re-render? Is diffing against buffer lines actually cheaper than just replacing everything once a thread has hundreds of comments? I'd guess the nvim API calls dominate.
I'd recommend saving actual HN item IDs rather than feed positions. Since the front page reorders constantly, relying on item IDs makes returning to a saved thread completely predictable.
hey thanks for your input. unless i'm misunderstanding, hntui does save/store HN item IDs (and the Saved tab refetches)... but i think you might be pointing somehting else out that i'm not seeing (maybe the cursor)?
It's also exactly the kind of thing that would have gotten my attention a few years ago, but now any chatbot could whip up in 20 minutes, exactly how you want it.
Have opinions about the stack (for how little it matters)? Secrets storage and session management? Whatever you want, just say that. It ain't avionics.
your point exactly. there's a fair bit of room for improving this relatively simple project, but it's mainly the look and feel i was after without shamelessly shipping slop
As an aside, 'meaningful' is an obtuse adjective to use there; and it's typical of text generated by Claude.[0] I seem to see it a lot more frequently than pre-AI (~2022). Maybe my next project will be statistically analyzing word frequencies in HN comments pre-AI and post-AI.
Thanks for you concern, I typed that message out by hand and genuinely meant it. The terseness stems from the use of a mobile phone, not Claude. As it happens, I don't have an Anthropic account, nor do I possess an OpenAI one. If you look at my comment history, you'll notice I've been around for a while (as I noticed, have you).
Hmm, it is cool, but I feel obligated to ask why. Does it portend the future where we mostly interact with website through designated intermediaries that are not generic web browsers. I am not messing with you. I am curious what you envision.
hey thanks for trying it out. honestly, this was just a fun selfish project because i'm really into the look and feel of tuis lately. there's no overarching vision with using tui/intermediaries for browsing the web, i believe browsers exist for a reason that LLMs haven't been able to replace yet :)
Browser plus vimium is one fewer thing to break. A TUI means scraping HN's HTML or hitting the API, and that works fine until the markup changes and nobody remembers why it's blank.
Same here, clx is what I open every morning. Nested comment view with proper indentation is the killer feature, and it opens links in the browser with one key. Hard to go back to tabs.
wow this really blew up! it's so fulfilling and wild to see my post in the top page... using my tui! thanks guys, and i'll take all the valuable feedback into making this better.
Made me think of a cool way to burn tokens: browser that reports websites you visit to an agent, which then writes a TUI for that site, ultimately leading you to a collection of low-resource UIs for the five or so websites you actually visit. Then you stop needing to use a browser and your 16GB RAM with a browser using 64GB of RAM becomes a system with free RAM for the first time in years.
Think: Lynx but pretty.
(Also bonus, bot checks that flag you as one means you have more free time to not get advertised to or sucked into Internet drama.)
hey thanks for trying hntui out. that would be ideal, i honestly thought of hooking up brow.sh locally to achieve that. it just gets finicky with a few articles but is a decent experience. i'll keep testing and evaluate the option of a browser config for the tui so you can choose how you'd like to open the link.
not yet mainly because the official api is read only and i didn't dabble in POST-ing. i will say that while building this out, my interest in being logged in to the tui declined and i enjoy just using it for reading. but that's not to say i'd block a feature because of my opinions on it. if i can make it happen, i will give the option :D
Great! Get the News part of Hacker News without the Drama part of Hacker News. It's always better to increase friction to help you wean yourself off destructive habits like this one, where I'm spending time sending text to a stranger who will immediately discount my thoughts since I'm not them.
Long time ago I had an extension for my browser that would "pause" every social media comment I made and do analysis to see if I was acting like a dick. Maybe I should get it working again.
It all started when I found some website where you'd give it your Reddit account, and it'd do a bunch of processing and produce a report about how much you swore, if you had net favorability or not with up/down votes, sentiment analysis to see if you were coming from a place of friendship, etc. It really drove my behavior in a more positive direction.
I'm a kind, not just nice, person IRL. But the Internet turns humans into text, and I was taught as a child to engage harshly and critically with all text. That is to say, I had good English lit teachers.
hey thanks for trying it out! i want logins/posting as well, but it doesn't seem likely given their current api. but i will look into it more and hopefully be able to support it sometime in the future! :)
interesting, i wonder if the looks/animation work the same. i'd started with opentui and knew nothing about existing tui libraries like ratatui and bubbletea, but at ship time i did see the binary size was much more than i expected and that irked me. i wonder if that goes down too with ratatui.
haha those 2 lines look awkward together at first glance. the binary doesn't need node/bun. the runtime is compiled into the executable (that's most of its size). :)
We had the same README confusion shipping a Bun CLI. Splitting it into "download a release binary" and "build from source (needs bun)" headings killed the dependency complaints for us.
And this is why people aren’t going out of the loop any time soon. A normie asks the bot to make a project, it produces nonsensical complexity like this.
Curious how it handles deep threads. As far as I know, subtree collapsing is what makes long HN discussions readable in a terminal, and plenty of clients get it wrong. Does hntui support it?
