HakTok

HakTok turns Hacker News into something that looks like short videos: only one post appears on screen at a time, with its title, image, and summary laid out, and a row of buttons on the right to open the original, save it, comment, or share. When you finish one, swipe up and the next one comes — exactly like scrolling short videos, except everything here is a tech post from HN.

It has one clever touch: it guesses what kinds of posts you like from what you clicked and saved, and that guessing happens in your own browser, never sent to a server. What it shows you is mixed on purpose: roughly 20% is what's hot right now, 20% is exploratory content far from your interests, and the remaining 60% is what it predicts you'll like — so you don't get only more of the same, and you don't get only the trending posts either.

Two things to note: first, it only reposts HN posts — it has no videos of its own, so don't mistake it for a real short-video app. Second, the author built it for himself, and it happened to launch on the same day Karpathy posted HackerTube, purely by coincidence, not as a copycat.

It suits people who don't have time to browse HN but don't want to miss good posts: a few swipes in a queue or on a commute keeps you up with what tech circles are talking about. When you want an overview of many posts at once, the HN homepage is still the better place.