Hacker News Reader

Discourse is essentially a SPA (see http://try.discourse.org/) and designed to be public-facing. It does a good job at providing a very bare, lightweight interface for people with JavaScript disabled and, I'm assuming, for web crawlers.

View on HN

FWIW.. it looks overkill for me

I'd much rather use Forem.

...because?

Do they use open source libraries? And otherwise how do they differ from something like Angular?

Discourse is open source:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

It uses ember.js with a Rails backend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com