Reader notes / about
A calmer way through Hacker News.
HN Daily turns the Best page into a compact reading queue. It keeps discussion and article visits separate, adds restrained summaries, and remembers what you actually finished.
The core rule
Read the conversation. Visit the source.
What it does
Every feature, by design.
A focused daily feed
HN Daily reads the top 25 stories from Hacker News Best and refreshes the feed every 30 minutes. The live indicator shows when the current list was updated, while the progress plate shows how much of the queue you have completed.
Use All, Unfinished, and Complete to narrow the list without losing your place.
Links that match reading intent
Story titles open the Hacker News discussion. The separate, highly visible source button opens the original article. Comment counts are real buttons, so the two destinations stay obvious and easy to scan.
Both destinations open in a new tab and are tracked independently.
Completion means both
A story is complete only after you have visited both the discussion and the source. Each action gets its own visited state; fully completed rows become deliberately quieter so unfinished stories remain visually dominant.
The checkbox on the right can mark both steps complete or reset the story to unread.
Summaries on demand
The Show summaries control reveals a short description beneath every story. HN Daily uses the post text, the article’s own description metadata, or a readable opening paragraph, with a neutral fallback when a source cannot be read.
Summaries are cached per story URL and HTML entities are decoded before display. They are not regenerated on every page load or 30-minute feed refresh; they change only when the source URL changes.
Share links with useful previews
The small Share action creates an HN Daily link with the title and summary embedded as social metadata. Telegram and other preview clients can show context before the recipient opens the link.
Opening a shared link immediately continues to the Hacker News discussion, where the recipient can read the comments or follow the title to the original article. Direct buttons remain as a no-JavaScript fallback.
A deliberately bounded archive
Only stories that have appeared in the HN Daily top feed can receive a share page. The share route never fetches an arbitrary Hacker News ID, which prevents it from becoming an open proxy for the entire HN archive.
Once indexed, a story’s share page remains available. First-seen and last-seen timestamps are retained for future maintenance without breaking old shared links.
Resilient when sources wobble
The feed is cached so repeated visits do not hammer Hacker News or article sites. Clear loading and retry states keep the reader understandable when a request fails.
If the live feed is temporarily unavailable, HN Daily can show a safe sample list. Sample items are never indexed or offered as permanent share links.
Public without chasing search traffic
Anyone with the address can open HN Daily and its valid share pages without a ChatGPT account. The reader still asks search engines not to index it, keeping the experience oriented around direct use and intentional sharing.
The native share menu is used where available; otherwise the permanent share URL is copied to the clipboard.
Favorites in multiple categories
The star beside a story saves it to the Favorites library. A single favorite can live in several personal categories at once, or remain Unsorted, and new categories can be created without leaving the feed.
Deleting a category only removes that label. The favorite remains saved and keeps every other category assigned to it.
An independent Reading List
Read later saves an article to a separate queue for stories you want to revisit without necessarily making them favorites. The same story can be in Favorites, Reading List, both, or neither.
Removing a story from one collection never removes it from the other. Both collections remain available in the same saved-library page.
Memory & privacy
Public reader. Private progress.
Local to this device
Your reading state, favorites, and categories are stored in the browser. They survive refreshes without creating an account or sending personal reading history to cloud storage.
Private cloud sync
The owner can sign in through Cloudflare Access to sync history, favorites, categories, and the Reading List across visits. Existing local data is merged into the private cloud record after sign-in.
Local mode only
Other identities are not authorized for cloud history or saved items. They can still use the public reader, with personal data kept only in their own browser.
Built for scanning
Readable type, clear actions, adaptive layout.
The desktop layout keeps status columns vertically aligned. On smaller screens, story metadata and buttons reflow into larger touch targets while the title remains the visual focus. Keyboard focus, semantic labels, loading states, and reduced-motion preferences are supported throughout.