Hacker News is one of few remaining corners of the Internet optimized for content quality and user‑friendliness over maximizing engagement metrics and hostile monetization. Thanks to not supporting images, discouraging snarky jokes, and otherwise excellent moderation efforts, its comment section has a higher signal‑to‑noise ratio than other mainstream online communities.
For a long time though, I missed support for highlighting interesting threads, and tracking new responses. In particular, since the messages are mostly plain text, I thought it'd be fun to read them like a Usenet group, with a client designed for that purpose. I tinkered for a while with building a NNTP gateway, similar to nntpit, but it turned out impractical.
Eventually I concluded that building a standalone client would be a simpler and more elegant solution. I decided to stick to the traditional terminal-based interface of the classic news readers like slrn and mutt. Unlike a web browser, it can show only one message at a time. This naturally prevents me from opening several threads at once and compulsive scrolling. Instead, it lets me slow down and focus.
The app is self-contained in a single source file and only depends on Python 3.9. If you'd like to check it out, you can run it with the following commands:
$ curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/luke8086/retronews/main/retronews.py
$ python3 retronews.py
Press ? for the list of keybindings. You can find more info at https://github.com/luke8086/retronews
~luke, 2022-09-10