visual.hcker.news

Visual-HN with preview images/Open Graph metadata, descriptions, zoom, position trends, and more — a FastAPI proxy that enriches hcker.news (itself a Hacker News clone) stories with Open Graph imagery and metadata, then serves them to a browser extension that overlays the feed.

Live: hn.is-ai-good-yet.com

Features

Proxy & enrichment backend

• ✅ Proxies the hcker.news homepage and injects preview assets into the response
• ✅ Fetches Open Graph metadata (og:image, og:description) for every story
• ✅ Downloads and resizes images to a consistent 16:9 thumbnail (max 640px JPEG)
• ✅ Tracks each story's position trend over time (rising / falling / steady)
• ✅ Exposes story metadata and image assets through the Visual-HN API
• ✅ Async SQLite persistence via SQLAlchemy + aiosqlite

Tech Stack

• Backend: Python 3.10+, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, aiosqlite, aiohttp, curl_cffi
• Scraping: curl_cffi (TLS fingerprint impersonation), BeautifulSoup4, Pillow, Playwright
• Frontend: Proxied hcker.news runtime; legacy HTML/Tailwind page (retired)
• Database: SQLite with async access

Setup

The proxy/scraper runs on Ubuntu. See docs/DEPLOYMENT.md for the full operational guide. Commands below are VPS-only (Ubuntu/bash).

git clone https://github.com/ilyaizen/visual-hn.git
cd visual-hn
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn main:app --reload

Open http://localhost:8000.

Browser extension

Load visual-hn-previews/ unpacked:

1. Open chrome://extensions
2. Enable Developer mode
3. Click Load unpacked
4. Select the visual-hn-previews/ directory
5. Open hcker.news

See visual-hn-previews/README.md for extension settings, keyboard shortcuts, and dev tests.

Project Structure

File	Purpose
main.py	FastAPI app, routes, lifespan setup
hcker_proxy.py	hcker.news proxy with preview asset injection
hn_scraper.py	Fetches top stories from the HN Firebase API
metadata.py	Open Graph parsing, image download/resize
database.py	Async persistence, trend calculation
residential_fetcher.py	Headless Chrome fallback (nodriver, residential node)
filter_lists.py	Content-blocker filter list compilation
models.py	SQLAlchemy ORM models
templates/	Legacy HTML templates
static/	CSS, images, favicon
visual-hn-previews/	Chrome/Edge extension for hcker.news
scripts/	Residential-fetcher service + watchdog (Win)
docs/	Deployment, node setup, rebrand runbooks

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Current focus is the hcker.news proxy, preview assets, and the Visual-HN API.

License

MIT