Hacker News
Top stories, your way. Front page, New, Show HN, or Ask HN — with a points floor, an external-only filter, and one-click access to the comments.
A focused HN reader, scoped to whatever flavour of the site you actually read. Each row shows the title, host, points, comment count, and age — title goes to the link, the comment count goes to the discussion. No tracking pixels, no infinite scroll, no "recommended for you."
- 1. Why we moved off our second-brain app412 pts · 138 comments
- 2. The case against Notion-as-OS287 pts · 96 comments
- 3. I rewrote my dev setup in 200 lines224 pts · 42 comments
- 4. Tailwind v4 in production: six months in198 pts · 71 comments
Add it to your dashboard
Press E , A , pick Hacker News. Drops in eight wide, four tall — enough for ten stories before scrolling kicks in. Stretch taller for the New source if you want a longer firehose view.
No connection needed. The widget pulls from HN's Algolia-powered search, which is public — there's no token, no rate-limit-per-account, just a 5-minute cache on the response.
How rows read
- Title links to the article. Clicking the headline opens the linked URL in a new tab. If the story has no external link (Ask HN, etc.), it opens the comment thread instead.
- Comment count links to the thread. The little N comments number underneath is its own link, going to the story's HN page. So whichever you actually want, you're one click away.
- Host is shown for external links. A small subtle
hostname on the metadata row tells you where the story leads
(
github.com,arxiv.org, etc.) before you click — useful for deciding whether you've got the bandwidth for a 90-comment thread or a PDF.
Settings
| Setting | Type | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Source Front page is the curated top stories. New is the firehose. Show HN and Ask HN are the dedicated sections — useful when you want a quieter, more focused read than the front page. | Front page · New · Show HN · Ask HN | Front page |
| Stories to show Cap on the number of stories rendered, between 3 and 30. Bigger means more scrolling within the widget; smaller keeps it skim-friendly. | integer | 10 |
| Minimum points Zero means no point filter. Useful with the New source — set to e.g. 50 to drop the chaff and only see stories that have already gathered some momentum. | integer | 0 |
| Hide self-posts Hides stories that don't link out (the ones that point to a comment thread on HN itself). Leave off if you read for the discussion as much as the links. | toggle | off |
Small things you might miss
- Refresh is one click. The little refresh icon in the card header force-refreshes the cache. Spinning indicator while it's fetching, relative-time stamp when it's done.
- Two widgets, two reads. Run one on Front page and another on Show HN if both matter to you. They share the cache when parameters match, so the cost is tiny.
- Minimum points is a real filter. Stories below the threshold are dropped server-side. If your filter is too aggressive on the New source, you might see an empty card — that's not a bug, just a quiet morning.
Heads up
- The Algolia HN API is best-effort. Outages on Algolia's end will show an error message; the cache will keep serving the last successful response until then.
- No comment preview. The widget is a list, not a reader. Clicking a comment count opens the HN thread page in a new tab — we don't render comments inline.