Discussion
Somebody dressed Hacker News up as the front page of The New York Times...
Hacker Times takes the front page of Hacker News and lays it out like a newspaper, with a masthead, columns and a lead story up top. The site calls itself "An independent, AI-edited front page from Hacker News, updated hourly," and adds, in case anybody's lawyers are reading, that it's "Not affiliated with The New York Times or Hacker News."
There's real editing behind the costume.
The thread had fun with it. One commenter said "i'm open to the idea that its the NYTimes that needs a HN inspired version." Another asked, "What about the ads, the tracking, the pop-ups and the limited-time special offers?" And one said the layout "breaks the links up in a useful way," which is the part I'd actually miss if it went away.
It's not the first try at this, either. An older project on GitHub, paper-hn, calls itself a "Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper."
The idea keeps coming back because it works.
If you read Hacker News every morning anyway, I'd give this a week as your homepage. The biggest story gets the biggest headline, and a newspaper page shows you everything at once, which a list never quite does.
Coffee not included.
The lead is the story with the "highest total points on the current first Hacker News page," and the "other stories come from a bounded sample of the past 30 days," so a good thread from last week gets a second shot at page one. The masthead is "set in Manufacturing Consent," a font name that's a joke all by itself.
The person who built it, polpenn, explained it on Hacker News: "I thought it would be fun to browse HN as if it were a newspaper. The site updates once an hour."