How I built a Hacker News mobile web app, Part 2
In this technical retrospective (2012), @cheeaun shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 92 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 21 comments
Looks great. I love the amount of effort you spent in CSS to make it look native. A couple feedback notes:
1. You might want to add the following to remove the Mobile Safari UI chrome when users add the app to the Home Screen:
2. On the iPad, the clickable regions are a bit awkward. The external link takes up a good 95% of the menu item. The view comments link is (logically) the button, but it's too small relative to the importance of the discussion on HN.
Great work from a technical perspective!
Off-topic: Best way to read HN on mobile IMHO is just to take the Android stock browser, surf to HN and forward the article links with a long press on the article titles to Readitlater or similar services without opening the articles. Fast, simple and convenient (and a great example for Android's intents). I think on iOS there some more steps plus the HN site isn't well readable in iOS' stock browser because of the missing word wrap—maybe that's the reason why there are so many HN apps on iOS while we have only one on Android.
I was also thrown off by the "the HN mobile web app" and thought it was official. I came to the comments to say, "could you please set the viewport on the regular website and save me the need for an app?", which I still want to say, but not to a third-party developer.
But really, that looks great. Love the attention to detail! I like mobile web approaches a lot. And getting that native look and feel seems to be a big reason (sometimes unspoken) why clients don't want to use the browser. Nice to see some effort put into breaking down that barrier.
Thanks again for another great post.
I agree entirely about HNmobile being a non-standalone app. I've being working on something similar and after considering deploying it as a standalone webapp or even wrapping it with PhoneGap and submitting it to the app store I've gone with a non-standalone web app. Basically if a substantial part of your 'app' is opening links in mobile safari then keeping the app in a traditional browser environment (with back button etc) gives the best user experience.
"As long as there's no way for me to simulate a built-in browser in a web app, HNmobile will remain being a non-standalone app."
I'm not sure if you had a look at it yet but there is a PhoneGap/Cordova plugin called ChildBrowser that may do what you want here. I can help you getting setup with a PhoneGap project for your app if you want!
"Since it's hosted on another domain, the API supports CORS so that HNmobile can do cross-domain XMLHttpRequests."
Why don't you use JSONP?