I worked on a similar app [1] and it runs as a standalone web app on the iOS homescreen as well. A couple of things that I love about it:
1. I've done away with a lot of the features the OP has - such
as comments (unless it's Ask HN), time of post and link. This
has made it more lightweight and faster to load on slow mobile
networks in my area.
2. Also, it's only updated twice a day since I actually built
this for myself to stop spending so much time on HN.
3. And since I found myself only reading the front page on my
commute to work, it aggregates all the front page articles into
one nice page instead of opening one article up at a time.
Not to take away from the OP, but would love any feedback on the whole "less is more" approach.
This is cool. Finding myself spending too much time on HN, I'm looking to write something similar myself with the purpose of making a weekly digest of only the top stories.
Looks like a few [1][2] have already made the efforts to write filtering based on karma score.
Edit: The OP's app is very close to what I want, but instead of limiting to top 10, use a point threshold directly.
I prefer the way this one preloads the story contents; I take the subway to work so I have a while without internet access. It would be nice to have comment links at least though, so there's the option to read them if it seems interesting. And the 'open all' button doesn't work for me, assuming that's what the '^' in the top right corner is supposed to do.
Hi Kevin, Thank you for your feedback. The '^' was meant to reveal a translation feature that I was working on, but I suppose 'Open All' would be a more worthwhile feature to implement. The markdown on HN makes it a little tricky to render comments (with their nesting), but glad you mentioned it [1]. Anyone second that feature request?
[1] Wasn't sure of how many people read comments before the article, or read them at all - I stopped when I found that it gave me a biased read, especially on the Show HN type posts.
Refreshing indeed to see a hacker talk about faith.
I was talking to a friend the other day that said the Devil had internet from the start; but it's only now that we see blogs pop up on faith. So thank you Paul for this.
Also, being the top post on HN is just the push I needed to write on my faith. Was initially afraid that it'd turn my readership away. So thank you once again for teaching me to not hold back.
As an Engineer, I'm finding that faith and logic can go hand-in-hand after all. The more I question my faith, the stronger it gets.
I'm also reminded of Dostoevsky's search. Who am I to argue with a Great Thinker who spent years arguing against God's existence only to admit he was wrong in the end.
Your logic doesn't stand up here. Why should you trust dostoyevsky's subjective understanding of god anymore than your own? Besides, dostoyevsky's best asset was his imagination, not his capacity for logic.
What he says is that for religious people, rules of logic and interference only have to applied a limited number of times. So they never arrive at the contradictions their logic really has.
He also says that this mode of thinking is actually default for most people and also works in most cases. So I suppose you can still be an engineer, as long as you are lucky enough to have only projects that are solvable with the "just compute a limited number of steps" rule.
Well, let's not be so quick to judge - maybe they used the same themeforest template, or hired the same designer through YC - they are both YC after all.
Kudos to aditya, jay, mike and all who helped out at UWaterloo. Fun fact: They went through Velocity here first - never underestimate the power of tractions guys. Congrats!
Not to side-track from programming language semantics, but I hope to engage in a discussion on the sole entrepreneur as you mentioned.
Edit: I think the bottom line of your post and mine is that: No one does it alone. At least, that's my (perhaps more philosophical than technical) take on it. So for hackers and entrepreneurs to reach critical mass with their products/offerings, they need the input/help/support from those around them (family, friends, clients, etc).
It seems there's a huge opening in the market to make an end-to-end publishing solution. We're all taking this scrappy approach* to making our books work cross-device. It's something I'd gladly pay for.
I just shot you an invite to the PenFM beta, because you hit it on the head. www.pen.fm is taking on that end-to-end publishing challenge, and then some. Having worked in epublishing for a few years now, I think I've finally come up with a way to automate the hell out of epublishing--and the results show up. At any point in writing in PenFM, you can click download and get your work formatted perfectly in epub, mobi, or pdf. Formatting improvements are coming rapidly, and mostly present already for mobi.
The biggest problem I've recognized with epublishing is that you have to get the formatting down perfectly, and usually that requires a lot of work by hand making sure your input HTML file is exactly as it should be. When you control how content is inputted to a platform, it's much easier to automate perfect-formatted rendering of that input HTML file, including TOC by inference.
My service, http://bookspry.com, does something like that. It's still in semi-beta (which means I'm taking paying customers, but the "do-it-yourself" plan is still very much the "I'm-doing-it-for-you" plan, since you'd be shocked at the bizarre formatting options people put into their Word document that have to be cleaned).
[1] http://hn.dinopost.com/