YAVCHN

It seems that everybody has their own personalized Hacker News reader these days, and it's easy to see why. With agentic coding at your disposal, you can whip one up in an evening. So why did I write another one? Because I could!

Well, that's not the whole story. Whenever I browse Hacker News, I open the discussion in a new tab, click through to the article from there, pop back to the discussion, and so on, until I've got more tabs open than I can keep track of. What I really want is a quick look at the article and a sense of whether there's any interesting discussion, before I dive into either one.

Three panes

YAVCHN, short for Yet Another Vibe-Coded Hacker News, puts everything on one screen. The stories are listed down the left. The top right shows the linked article in a clean reader mode, and the bottom right shows the discussion. You can read Lobsters in it as well as Hacker News.

It follows the same rules I try to follow everywhere else:

• The URL is king. Every view has its own address, so you can bookmark a story or send it to somebody.
• The pages are rendered on the server and work without JavaScript. Script just makes things nicer.
• There are no accounts. Your pinned stories, dismissed stories, theme, pane sizes and blocked domains stay in your own browser. When you want to vote or reply, it sends you to the real site.

How it was built

This one really was vibe-coded. I wrote it over about four days in May 2026 with Claude as my pair programmer, which is the kind of project where vibe coding shines: small, self-contained, and something I'd use every day.

Details

• Written in Go with the standard library's HTTP server and templates, plus plain JavaScript, with no front-end framework.
• Articles are extracted with go-readability and cached in SQLite for 30 days.
• Adding another news site means writing one small Go interface.
• Runs with go run ./src, or as a single-binary Docker image.
• Licensed under MIT.

You can try it at yavchn.parkscomputing.com, and the code is on GitHub: github.com/paulmooreparks/yavchn.