
Show HN: Lesen.io a multi source tech reader for Hacker News, Reddit and Slashdot - messutied
https://lesen.io
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themckman
The German language appears to have a lot of good words for app names. In
fact, a lot of times when I'm trying to come up with names for apps and such,
I usually just head over to Google Translate and start translating mundane
English words into other languages until I get one that sounds cool coming off
my American-English tongue.

Lesen is the German verb meaning "to read". There was another submission
recently about an immutable/persistent data structure library named Immer
which means, roughly, "always".

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messutied
Definitively, I'm living in Germany currently and trying to learn the
language, hence the inspiration too

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messutied
I’ve been working on this app for reading Tech news from multiple sources in
one place and having easy access to the comments of each one, its something I
really wanted for me and didn’t find an app that would do it right.

I’d like to get some feedback before going much further on development, this
is the very minimal version of what I want it to be.

Stuff that I plan to add:

\- More sources (what other sources you know that would make sense to
include?) \- Save for later (even though I can already save to pocket from the
app, this would be nice to have) \- Configurable sources \- Allow hiding
stories \- Detection and hiding of duplicates \- User accounts: allow to sync
read, hidden and saved articles across platforms

What else would you like seeing in this app? :)

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sonofgod
No splash screen. Just show me the web app already, and maybe tell me there's
an app on the webapp page. :P

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messutied
Thanks Im definitively changing this :)

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charlieegan3
How are the rankings for items from HN & Reddit weighted in the 'all' list?
Surely this is hard to balance correctly?

When I made [http://serializer.io](http://serializer.io) I opted to list items
that reached a certain threshold sequentially but I've wondered about how I
might better present the vote information.

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messutied
Well really I just keep the ranking order as in each source site and
intercalate them, like one HN one Reddit, one Slashdot, all keeping the order
of each front page.

I'm still thinking on what would be the optimal way to display them, but
didn't heard of [http://serializer.io](http://serializer.io) is it basically
the same concept? the only site I found doing a similar thing was
[http://reader.one/](http://reader.one/) but its IOS app is not so nice.

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charlieegan3
Ok gotcha; so order is an alternated list of the three sources. This is a good
default but you might be able to do something fun here - perhaps ranking
stories based on their vote count stdev from the mean score might give an
interesting list.

serializer is just a web app and lists stories in a sequential feed - while it
has HN, reddit & slashdot on there it's kind of a different concept. It's more
of a 'reader'/feed that happens to combine various sources.

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lewisjoe
A bit off topic here. I'd like to appreciate how tiny, the payload for the
site is. The main js, is just over 18 kb. Too small for a SPA. It loads
quickly and reacts reasonably quickly. Good job on that.

Noticed that the analytics related js file alone, took over 11kb. We can do a
better job at this.

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messutied
Thanks :) Im proud at the minimalistic approach I took for this project, been
working with react.js lately, I just wanted the simplest and fastest type of
app here, and Phoenix seems to be responding pretty well too

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notheguyouthink
Sidenote, this UI is really white. Really, really white. A dark option would
be huge for me :)

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messutied
Thanks for the feedback :) I will consider adding a dark theme option, I
thought very white UI would be nice for readability

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notjackson
I really like the tone HN is using. Together with iOS's Night shift feature it
creates even better colors to read on IMO, but on your current colors it has
no effect at all.

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gressquel
maybe you should make the webapp version the front page, with the "get the app
on appstore" as just a link.

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anondon
It's nice to have a single interface to access multiple sources, but when you
click on the comments you are taken to the origin site's comment section. If
you could comment directly from your webapp that would be a very useful.

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basch
Panda is already really good at this, specifically for these type of sites,
without the customization/personalization hurdles of feedly et al.

[https://usepanda.com/](https://usepanda.com/)

The browser app and chrome extension let you click to go either to the
comments or directly to the post. works for tons of sites like hacker news,
lobsters etc.

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messutied
Maybe its just me, but I find panda too complex to use, I just tried one more
time now and could not get a simple combination of this 3 sources of news in
one timeline, I wanted something simpler and that would work without
configuration to get good tech news

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basch
my problem with almost every program is a lack of deduplication. really only
techmeme and google news deduplicate stories well. i want ten places covering
one story to show up only once, with ten links to the variants.

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messutied
I'm definitively putting more effort in this, thanks

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basch
if the reddit link is bloomberg and the slashdot link is business insider,
they should still show up as one story, with links to both discussions.

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messutied
Exactly my thoughts!, Im just a little concerned on how to accurately
determine when two different links are the same story, it would be very bad to
join different stories into one by mistake

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basch
can you parse techmeme or google news or someone that already does it?

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tytrin
Cool! If you've currated the sources that could make it easier. You should
take a look at feedly [ [http://feedly.com/](http://feedly.com/) ]. You could
learn from their UX, and maybe improve upon it. I currently use them on my
browser and my phone(android), and I enjoy the experience and control.

Good luck!

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messutied
Thanks for the feedback, I thought people would appreciate a more minimalistic
UI similar to Hacker News, but I might have gone too far :)

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jeremyswank
The web app version should have an RSS feed.

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lightedman
So we're aggregating aggregators, now?

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messutied
Well yes :D I really like aggregators as for me great part of the experience
is the community, reading the comments, so I wanted a place where I can do
this for the different aggregators

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notheguyouthink
Another good source to add is Lobste.rs. I love it. If it was more popular i'd
easily pick it over Reddit/HN, but it's quite small currently.

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messutied
Thanks I will check it out :)

