Keyboard
- j / k
- Move down and up the story list. The arrow keys scroll whatever has focus.
- Enter
- Read the marked story in the article reader.
- ]
- Read the next story in the same article-reader applet. Back returns to the previous story.
- p
- Pin or unpin the marked story, which keeps it in Pinned.
- n / N
- Move to the next or previous top-level comment in the window in front.
- c
- Collapse or expand that comment.
- f
- Hide or show the story list.
- Esc
- Close a menu or this help.
- Access key m
- Go to the menu bar. Most browsers take it with Alt on Windows and Linux, and Safari with Control and Option.
- ?
- Show this help.
Windows
Each story opens in a window holding its article above its discussion; drag the bar between them to share the room differently. A window can be moved by its title bar, resized from any edge, snapped to a half or a corner by dragging it there, maximised, or minimised to the bar at the foot of the page. Use Window > New reader window to open an empty reader, or Story > Open in new reader window to open another reader for the current article. Docked readers keep their articles when you select another story from the sidebar. Minimized readers can be restored and reused for their site. A window's Next story link reads on down the list in the same window.
A link in a comment or an article to another Hacker News or Lobsters thread opens that thread in a window too. A link to a single HN comment opens the comment above its replies.
While a story's window is in front, the Story and Discussion menus in the menu bar hold its commands: pinning, Next story, sorting, collapsing every thread, jumping to the first new comment. Each window also remembers where you were in its article and discussion, so a reload, or Back to a story that Next took you past, finds your place again. Closing a window forgets it.
The whole arrangement lives in the address, so a bookmark or a shared link brings it back, and Back undoes the last change. Moving between Hacker News, Lobsters, their lists, Pinned and Find changes only the list, and leaves the windows open.
The list
The pin at the start of a row keeps the story in Pinned, and the cross at its end hides it. Pinned can be narrowed by words in the title, site or author, by source, and to the stories you haven't opened yet, and ordered by when you pinned them, by points or by comments; the filters are part of the address, so a filtered view can be bookmarked. Scroll past the end of the list to load more. Domain filters, in the View menu, hide every story from a site.
Collections are named lists of stories. Story > Add to collection files the story in front into one or more of them, and the Collections feed shows them all or one at a time; the menu that chooses collections also creates, renames, and deletes them. A note is your own text on a story. Choose Add note in a story's toolbar to write one; it saves as you type. Rows with a note carry the note mark, and the Notes feed lists every noted story and searches the text of your notes.
Browsing view
View > Windowed and View > Classic select the browsing view and save your default in this browser. Window view reuses a reader for each feed. Classic view opens stories and applets as pages. Open as a page is a one-off action that does not change your saved default. Use the Windowed selector to return an article to a window. Direct page links always open as pages.
Applets
The Applets menu in the menu bar holds three tools, each a window of its own. Replies to me takes your Hacker News user name and lists the replies to your last thirty comments and stories, checking again every three minutes while it is open, and marking what is new since you last marked them read. Look up a user opens a profile on Hacker News or Lobsters, with their submissions and recent comments, as a commenter's name in any discussion does; the bar at the top of a profile looks up someone else in the same window, and Back returns to the one before. Who is hiring? filters the posts of HN's monthly hiring threads by the words you type.
They read only what the sites publish to everyone, so none of them asks for a login, and your user name stays in this browser anonymously and is included in retained applet state when signed in.
Find
Find takes any link and lists every time it was submitted to Hacker News and Lobsters, so you can read each discussion of it.
About
YAVCHN never sees your Hacker News or Lobsters login. The discussion is fetched from each site's public API; to vote or reply, follow the link above the discussion, or the arrow beside a comment, to the source's own site. Without a YAVCHN account, your data stays in this browser. When signed in, pins, collections, notes, blocked domains, and retained reading state are stored with your account and synchronized across devices. Hidden stories and layout stay in this browser. The privacy policy has the details.
Open source: github.com/paulmooreparks/yavchn. Built with PUDL.
I'm working on an evolutionary, accumulate-only database system called SirixDB written in Java (and a module in Kotlin) in my spare time and in my day to day job I'm also working as a software engineer (embedded; besides I'm dancing a lot -- swing dances, mainly Lindy Hop and travel to festivals in Europe often times in my holidays) :-)
Furthermore, I'm working on Brackit (http://brackit.io), a query engine for JSON and XML using a JSONiq like query language. It can be used as ad-hoc in-memory query processor as the query processor of a data store. We envision, that it encapsulates common proven optimizations whereas the individual data stores can add further stages to rewrite the queries for index matching and physical optimizations.
SirixDB (https://sirix.io or https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix) is all about efficient versioning of your data. That is on the one hand it reduces the storage cost of storing a new revision during each transaction-commit while balancing read- and write-performance through a novel sliding snapshot algorithm and dynamic page compression. On the other hand Sirix supports easy query capabilities for instance to open a specific revision by a timestamp or several revisions by a given timespan, to navigate to future or past versions of nodes in the tree-structure and so on. It basically never overwrites data and is heavily inspired by ZFS and Git and borrows some ideas and puts these to test on the sub-file level.
In stark contrast to other approaches SirixDB combines copy-on-write semantics with node-level versioning and does not require a write-ahead-log for consistency.
It all started around 2006 as a university / Ph.D. project of Marc Kramis and I worked on the project since 2007 and already did my Bachelor's Thesis, Master's Thesis as well as several HiWi-Jobs on topics regarding the project and I'm still more eager than ever to put forth the idea of a versioned, analytics plattform to perform analytical tasks based on current as well as the history of the data.
e-mail address: lichtenberger.johannes@gmail.com