HN Glance

HN Glance is a visual Hacker News reader. It keeps Hacker News as the source of truth, but gives readers a more visual way to scan stories, judge links, and read discussions.

Production: https://hnglance.com/

Why HN Glance Exists

Hacker News is fast and information-dense, but it is also heavily text-based. A title, score, and comment count do not always tell you what you are about to open. Some links are thoughtful essays, papers, or useful technical writeups. Others are thin product pages, ad-heavy landing pages, paywalls, modals, or low-signal posts.

HN Glance adds visual context before the click. Each story card includes a preview of the linked page so you can quickly ask:

• Does this look like a real article, paper, announcement, or discussion starter?
• Is the page readable, substantial, and worth opening?
• Does it look like a marketing page, dark pattern, modal wall, or low-value landing page?
• Do I want the article, the HN discussion, or neither?

The goal is not to replace Hacker News. It is an alternative way to consume the same public HN stories: more visual, easier to scan, and still quick.

HN Glance's discovery feeds intentionally include only submissions with an explicit, non-empty source URL supplied by Hacker News. Ask HN, jobs, polls, and other text-only submissions without a linked page are not shown in Top, Best, New, or Show: without a source page there is nothing meaningful for the visual preview to evaluate. Their HN item pages can still be opened directly, but HN Glance never synthesizes an HN discussion permalink to make them eligible for a feed card.

What It Does

• Shows Top, Best, New, and Show HN feeds.
• Presents each story with a visual page preview, title, source, freshness, author, points, and comment count.
• Opens an HN Glance story page for the card, with metadata, comments, screenshot, exact-source HN history, similar stories, and value-grouped links shared in the discussion.
• Opens the original source from the source/domain link.
• Searches link stories as the same visual card grid: titles and sources must contain every short-query term (prefixes only complete long terms), discussions can surface a story with a "Matched in discussion" note, and a multi-word query with few exact title matches takes a semantic pass (a Workers AI query plan for retrieval and Clef Flash relevance judgments) instead of loose word matching, and the past month (the 28-day screenshot retention window) is the default range. Pasting a link lists that source's HN submissions, largest discussion first. Discussion matches quote the comment that mentions the query and link to it. "exact phrase", -word, by:username, and Show HN narrow results. Press / anywhere to search; node scripts/search-eval.mjs evaluates ranking against a running server.
• Renders HN comments with safer rich text, nested branches, quote handling, reference links, expand controls, and comment sorting at every level by recent activity, discussion size, or oldest first.
• Offers an optional discussion focus for deep branches: each column is a sibling set along the selected reading path, browsable with Finder-style arrow keys, while the comment reader can show either the current comment or the complete root-comment-to-current reading path. The columns can be hidden while reading: the reader then sets larger type, lists the direct replies under the current comment, and keeps arrow-key navigation.
• Includes user activity pages for posts and comments.
• Supports responsive layouts and dark mode.
• Avoids analytics and marketing cookies.

Product Philosophy

HN Glance treats each story as something to evaluate visually before reading. The screenshot is not decoration; it is the main browsing affordance.

The card model is intentionally simple:

• The preview helps you judge the linked page.
• The title confirms what the story is.
• The source and timestamp orient you.
• The score and comments provide HN context.
• The card opens the HN Glance story page.
• The source link opens the external article.

This keeps the browsing flow direct: scan, compare, open, or move on.

The loop continues through two distinct decisions:

• Feed discovery: Which linked story deserves attention?
• Story overview: Where does that story's value appear to be: in the submitted source, the HN discussion, or resources introduced by the discussion?

Those paths are intentionally asymmetric. The source preview is an inspection surface that helps a reader decide whether to open the publisher's page. Links from the discussion form an index into external resources and the comments that introduced them. The HN discussion is the sustained reading surface HN Glance can present end to end while preserving authorship and reply context.

The overview remains the default, including its familiar nested comment tree. When a discussion becomes too deep to scan comfortably through indentation, the optional discussion focus projects that same already-loaded tree into Miller columns: root comments first, then one sibling set for each selected reply level, with the complete current comment in a fixed comment reader. Its optional Reading path mode renders every ancestor in full, opens at the current comment so the argument can be read upward, and provides Go to root comment and Go to current comment jumps. Compact source previews reuse the same extracted-link and favicon identity used by From the Discussion; they do not fetch page metadata. Each reader entry shows only links in that exact comment, while the overview's From the Discussion index remains the story-wide aggregate. Compact row excerpts are navigation labels, not a second comment dataset. Entry, exit, deep links, and browser history retain both the current comment and reader mode while the overview preserves its own disclosure state.

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