HACK for YC's Hacker News is the most beautiful and easy way to read about the latest tech, startup and STEM news.
- No Ads. No subscriptions.
- Login or Register your Hacker News account
- PUSH NOTIFICATIONS for Hacker News replies to comment or post
- Supported on iPhone, iPad, and Mac
- Comments are presented in nested threads
- Tap a comment to collapse that thread
- Swipe left or right on stories and comments to upvote and favorite
- Ability to submit new posts including drafts
- Long press a story, link or comment to share
- iPad supports split view
- On iPads, you can drag a story / comment / story's image (link) to open it in safari in split view. This is useful for when you are viewing the app in split view / multitasking and like opening the link / story / comment in a browser side by side.
- Landscape and Portrait support
- 3D touch for peek, pop support
- Home screen 3D touch shortcuts
- Hide posts from the feed
- Tap the bottom button to scroll to the next root comment in the thread. Long press it to go to the previous one
- All known hacker news endpoints - News, front page, Ask HN, Show HN, Show HN Newest, classic, active, best stories, best comments, new stories, new comments, noob stories, noob comments, jobs, over 100-500 points
- Submit posts, reply, comment using your HN account
- Browse top 100 leader accounts
- Browse stories from a specific site, user or date
- Search in comments and usernames! Search is case and diacritic insensitive and ignores punctuations. Search uses an CONTAINS, OR operation if multiple words are typed.
- Can select / highlight the comment/post title text for lookup/copy/translate etc iOS native operations.
- Powerful search (powered by Algolia API) - use @date to sort by date, #story to filter for stories, #comments to filter for comments, #author_username to filter by user etc. These tags can be separated by commas. Refer to https://hn.algolia.com/api for more tags.
- Dark mode - both pure black and gray mode
- Low contrast text mode to make the text not be pure white
- Many color choices & color picker for customization
- App icons in variety of colours for light and dark mode
- Font choices
- Ability to change font sizes, padding etc to make the layout as compact as you like!
- Threaded comments with color bar to maintain visual orientation
- Articles open in Safari view with setting to automatically open in "readability" mode
- Tap the domain in a story to see all stories from that site
- Tap the username in a story or comment to go to the user profile
- Browse your submitted stories and comments, favorited stories and comments, upvoted stories and comments
- Archive: View an archive of the post website. archive.is, archive.org & google cache.
- Share comment as image
- Articles can be opened in built in safari or 3rd party browsers. Supports Brave, Firefox, Firefox Focus, Orion, Opera Touch, Dolphin, DuckDuckGo, iCab Mobile, Microsoft Edge and Chrome. Go to settings > Disable the "Use in-app Safari" setting > tap that row to change the default browser.
All stories and comments are via Algolia API and Hacker News API:
https://news.ycombinator.com/
https://hn.algolia.com/api
https://github.com/HackerNews/API
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I offer an ad and analytics free and beautiful app for the absolute best experience for my users. I need to run my own server for caching high quality favicons shown in the app plus for push notifications for replies to hacker news posts.
Small indie developers like me benefit from support from you. If you can afford it, please support me by purchasing a tip and one time only in app purchase. You can also leave a review on the app store.
Send me feedback at:
pran@pranapps.com
This app is the best app for hackernews that I’ve tried on iOS and I’ve tried a couple of them. It’s so good I paid for the pro version and it’s even better with the latest update. I really like all the settings/options. One suggestion I would have though would be adding a right swipe to go back to the previous page(basically the opposite of the left swipe). Apollo has this enabled by default. Another suggestion would be adding the ability to swipe away the long press options or hiding those options behind an overflow menu because I always find myself accidentally long pressing comments and bringing up the menu.
Developer Response
Today's update adds a button to the posts and comments to show the overflow menu. There's also 2 settings which you can use to disable the long press menu.As for right swipe to go back, I will add that in another update, need to do some research. Thanks.
Best so far
la03kd8ia
No purchase needed, no ads. Probably will pay the $5 to support the dev, though, because this kind of functionality is rare for ios apps without either ads or in-app purchases. Quite the hidden gem. Lots of settings to choose from. I especially like being able to select the text of a comment to copy by long-pressing on a comment, and from there, there are a lot of options, including copying the text as a whole, or selecting a certain part of the text as it pops up with the options. Now will look for other apps made by this dev! Edit: decided to purchase, it’s worth it
Developer Response
Thank you for the kind feedback! Glad you are supporting me :) you can look at my other apps like MoodWell mood tracker which is also without any ads/trackers/subscription.
Best app for Hacker News.
noahkiss
I continue to be impressed by this app. What started out as just a beautiful wrapper for HN has continued to evolve into easily one of the best experiences on iOS for consuming feeds, á la Apollo for Reddit. I have also had great success reaching out to the developer, as others mention. I recently noticed that there is a Share as Image feature, which is one of my biggest uses in Apollo - wow! Works great in HACK too! Easily worth the download and the purchase for premium. A+. Thanks Pranoy!
Probably the best for HN, still lacking
JoshStrange
No doubt this is the best HN app I’ve used but it doesn’t hold a candle to something like Apollo which I consider(ed) the gold standard for a link aggregator client.Tap targets are way too small, must but almost half of what the HIG recommends. I find it infuriating to try to tap the “…” or upvote button only to have it collapse the thread and rinse and repeat 3-10 times before it works.Reply notifications and logged in status in general is extremely buggy. I randomly get logged out so I’ll be browsing, go to upvote, and get a generic error. It’s at this point I’ll notice the “Downvote” option is missing but the app will still show me logged in. Sometimes the only fix is to kill the app and/or log out/in again. Similarly, clicking on the bell/notification icon will randomly tell me “You haven’t enabled reply notifications” which is a setting I’ve never toggled off, yet it gets toggled off on me without any action on my part.The app works well overall but interacting with posts and the inconsistent/buggy auth status drive me bonkers.
Developer Response
Regarding the buttons being too small, you can change that by increasing the “metadata font size” in the settings screen > “font sizes, compactness and padding”. Set it to something like 4 and I think it should be better.Regarding being logged out and notifications getting disabled, that sounds like a keychain issue on the phone. Has your phone had a repair recently? Email me at pran@pranapps.com if you have questions.
- Bug fixes for new SDK including Liquid Glass
- Fixed a bug where on iPads running iOS 26, buttons were going behind the new traffic control buttons.
- As requested, added a button to the search screen which shows the advanced search guide
- Fixed a bug where exporting history as CSV on iPads was crashing
- As requested, added a new setting allowing long pressing a comment to collapse root comment
- Fixed a bug where the ellipsis/menu button (...) wasn't showing the context menu and collapsing comment instead
- Improved legibility for text color for monospaced code blocks, metadata, and menu buttons
- HACK is supported on Mac, iPhone, iPad.
Small indie developers like me benefit from your support. I offer an ad and analytics free and beautiful app for the absolute best experience for my users. I need to run my own server for caching high quality favicons shown in the app plus for push notifications for replies to hacker news posts. If you can afford it, please support me by purchasing the one-time only in app purchase or giving me a tip. No subscriptions. You can also leave a review on the App Store. Thank you for choosing HACK.
If you have a programming job or have feedback, contact me at:
pran@pranapps.com
Version 151
The developer, Pranoy Chowdhury, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
