A fast, modern Hacker News client. Browse the feeds, read and reply to threads, and sign in to vote and submit, with your reading history kept on your device.
Live at blode.co/hn.
- Every HN feed: Top, New, Show HN, Ask HN, and jobs, switchable from the feed tabs.
- Fast reading: open any story to read the article and full comment thread, and move between stories with the keyboard.
- For you: an optional personalized feed that reorders stories from your reading habits (dwell time, opens, votes) using an on-device model (time decay, topic and domain affinity, diversity spacing).
- Private by default: your reading history and personalization live in the browser (IndexedDB) and never leave the device.
- Sign in with your HN account: upvote, comment, and submit directly from the app.
- Likes and bookmarks: save stories to read or revisit later.
- Search: full-text story search (Algolia HN) with recent-search history.
- Command palette and shortcuts:
Cmd/Ctrl+Kopens the command palette, plus keyboard shortcuts for moving between stories and feeds.
git clone https://github.com/mblode/hn.git
cd hn
npm install
npm run devOpen http://localhost:3000. The feed, ranking, search, and comments all work with no configuration: story data comes from public Hacker News APIs.
Upvoting, commenting, and submitting require signing in with a Hacker News account. The app proxies HN and stores your session in a cookie encrypted server-side, so it needs one secret:
# 32-byte key as 64 hex characters
echo "HN_SESSION_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32)" >> .env.localRestart the dev server after setting it. Without it, the app runs fine read-only; only authenticated actions are disabled.
The personalized ranking draws on a candidate corpus (lib/candidates.json) distilled from the full Hacker News archive. Both files are committed, so you only need this to refresh the corpus:
npm run download-hn # pull the HN archive from BigQuery into data/*.ndjson
npm run process-candidates # distill the top stories into lib/candidates.jsondownload-hn queries the public bigquery-public-data.hacker_news dataset and needs Google Cloud credentials (gcloud auth application-default login) plus a billing-enabled project. process-candidates is offline: it reads data/ and keeps stories above a score threshold.
| Script | What it does |
|---|---|
npm run dev |
Start the dev server on port 3000 |
npm run build |
Production build |
npm run start |
Serve the production build |
npm test |
Run the Vitest suite (npm run test:watch to watch) |
npm run check |
Lint and format check (Ultracite: Oxlint + Oxfmt) |
npm run fix |
Auto-fix lint and formatting |
npm run check-types |
Type-check with tsc --noEmit |
npm run knip |
Report unused files, exports, and dependencies |
Next.js 16 (App Router, React Compiler) and React 19, Tailwind CSS 4, TanStack Query for data fetching, Dexie for local IndexedDB storage, and Radix UI + cmdk for the interface. Requires Node.js 24+.
Crafted by 