HackerNews: With Privacy!*

😕 What is this?

This is yet another HackerNews reader with a difference! It captures the screenshot of the submitted articles and lets you read (or rather, view) them.

🤷 Why is it a big deal?

This may not be a big deal for you, actually the project was started to solve a very specific problem of mine, to be able to read HackerNews offline - and that was indeed a big deal for me!

🤯 How am I gonna use this offline?

Simply tap on the OFFLINE tab on the top while you are on a wifi (warning! downloads about 90 images) and you are good to go with reading top articles on each categories offline 🚉.

💪 What's the advantage of screenshots?

💨 Less data usage - yes, many sites consumes more data to render than loading a gigantic screenshot of that page.
🔒 Privacy for free! - since you are loading an image, you are skipping those trackers!
⛔ A lot of ads are blocked when screenshots are generated, you will only see the placeholders.
💪 For GitHub links, I will try to take the screenshot of the README.md file. Example
📱 Screenshots are taking by emulating the mobile phone, so readability is ensured!
🌛 It even tries to simulate system-wide dark mode, and websites that respect that will be dark!
🌒 There is a sitewide dark mode button, doesn't work for screenshots though!

💩 When does it suck?

This sucks big times on some cases, mostly when the site is not static or not designed to have any meaning when screenshotted.

When the article is too, too, too long.
When the site doesn't have an article or an interactive site
When large cookie policy warning obstructs the page (The screenshots are made in Europe 😉)
When the site doesn't appreciate screenshot taking bots!
When the site is not designed for a small screen!
When screenshots are not always available or yet to be captured! - it's a constant game of catching up with the latest articles posted in HackerNews site.
Pages are heavily cached, you may have to use the browser refresh button to get the latest articles.

🎉 What was the story behind it?

I spend a lot of time travelling on London Underground daily. Those are the unproductive time of my day. On the other hand, HackerNews contains so many useful articles to read, I needed to find a way to read them on my commute.

I wasn't happy with just reading the text of the articles as offered by other offline HackerNews reader at that time. I needed to able to read the article as is, as the writer wanted to present. Screenshot solves most of the problem, of course when it works!

* not to annoy privacy purists! you are indeed avoiding lots of trackers by reading from the image/screenshot rather than visiting those sites. While a lot of care has been taken to reduce linking third-party content, but this site also consumes content from a few other sites that may track you like cloudflare, imgur etc. This site uses a self hosted instance of Fathom analytics to collect basic, privacy focused analytics.

Send Feedback | WebAssembly Version (beta)

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