Hacker Pulse: HN Reader

Free to read, one purchase for the rest — no subscription. Every article re-typeset natively; Premium adds your type and paper, offline, sync and translation.

Hacker Pulse is a Hacker News reader built for reading — the article and the discussion, together, beautifully.

THE ARTICLE, RE-TYPESET Every story is fetched, parsed and laid out natively — no web view, no reader-mode shortcut, no external service. Set your type size, and with Premium the typeface, line height, margins, spacing and paper colour; images, code blocks, tables, quotes and lists all survive the trip. The discussion continues below the article in the same scroll, and your place in a long read is remembered.

BUILT FOR LONG THREADS The whole discussion arrives at once. Fold a subtree, step between conversations with the navigator, pull a deep reply's ancestors into view, open any comment on its own screen, or search inside the thread. Hold a comment to copy, share, translate, block or report.

YOURS TO KEEP Read state, saved stories and reading positions live on your device, and a mis-swipe can be undone. With Premium, a saved story is downloaded whole — article and discussion — and stays readable offline until you remove it.

TRANSLATE ON DEVICE With Premium, on iOS 26 and later, articles and comments translate entirely on your device. Nothing is sent to a server. The interface itself speaks nine languages — English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, 한국어, Français, Deutsch, Русский and العربية — including full right-to-left layout.

TWELVE LISTS, A WIDGET, AN iPad LAYOUT Top, New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN and Jobs from the official API, kept on disk so a cold launch is instant; Active, Classic and the front page from any day back to 2007; three score thresholds; and two lists of comments rather than stories. A widget in three Home Screen sizes — four on iPad — and one for the Lock Screen follows the list you choose. On iPad, a real two-column layout — list beside reader.

TAKE PART, IF YOU WANT TO Reading needs no account. Sign in with your own Hacker News account and you can also upvote, downvote, reply, submit a story, and edit or delete your own comments — without leaving for a browser. Your password is never saved; only the session, in your keychain, until you sign out.

QUIET BY DESIGN Block users, and with Premium mute title keywords or whole sites. No analytics, no tracking, no ads; the one server of ours the app ever talks to hands out reader-engine updates and learns nothing about you. Your reading habits are nobody's business — including ours.

FREE TO READ, ONE PURCHASE FOR THE REST Every list, every discussion, search, profiles, your account and the reader itself are free, with no ads and no time limit. One purchase — no subscription — unlocks Premium: your own type and paper, saved stories kept offline, iCloud sync and library import, on-device translation, read aloud, automatic archive lookup, discussion detail, hiding read stories, four more colours with their icons, and keyword and site filters. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac, and Family Sharing shares it.

AN HONEST NOTE Hacker News publishes no API for signing in, voting, replying or submitting, so Hacker Pulse does those the only way the site allows: by posting its own web forms, exactly as a browser does. They work today and could be broken by a redesign tomorrow. Hacker News itself has no downvote for stories, and it allows editing and deleting only for a couple of hours after posting.

Hacker Pulse first shipped in 2012. Version 2.0 is a complete rewrite that keeps the original's look — the same rust-and-orange chrome, the same pulse — and the same two-finger flick to switch between light and dark.

Hacker Pulse is an independent app, not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator. Story and comment data come from the public Hacker News and Algolia APIs.