Ask HN: What are the alternative HN front-ends with better discussion features? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the alternative HN front-ends with better discussion features?

6 pointsd336 comments

I have to admit I mostly come to HN in order to take part in discussions. Are there any sites that would let me use my HN credentials in order to let me post through them, providing a better front-end experience (i.e., sensible mobile) as well as some basic discussion features (e.g. "subscribe to this discussion")?

If there's none, I imagine I could start writing one.

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Maybe an extension to bystand and/or other NNTP clients might be helpful. That way, I can get the comments to be sorted in chronological order. (A protocol extension to bystand is simply a program that communicates with stdin/stdout using the NNTP protocol. I don't know if any other software than bystand supports this.)

I simply use this, but it may be too minimalist.

https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

Would you add a mode to always sort by date/time rather than by scoring? Unfortunately sometimes there is "more", and you cannot write a reply on pages other than the first one, and you have to look through all of the "more" to find the one you want, and the way it does sorting is problematic for that because I would want it to sort by the date/time instead

I don't think one could use HN's credentials outside HN. There isn't a Oauth2 API or equivalent as far as I know.

Sure, but if you use HN password on this one site only, it wouldn't hurt that much to share it with another website to manage the discussions for you. That was my reasoning. What do you think?

In general sharing passwords to a third party website is a red flag. HN may blacklist your servers for security. In general social networks like Facebook, Twitter, reddit, Github, LinkedIn,etc use Oauth2 for better security.

But you may have more chance if you build an open-source desktop app, using electron if you want to use web technologies.

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