Show HN: I built a Hacker News inspired newsboard for AI and robotics

[gazcrisa]

Hey my name is Crisa and this is my first post here on HN. I love this site and it inspired me to build a clone of it for my newsletter. Instead of having a boring landing page, I hope to gather articles, blogs, interesting projects on my own platform. I would appreciate any feedback, good or bad so that I can improve the site. Email: gazcrisa (at) gmail (dot) com

[anonzzzies]

I don’t like the X (left of the 'new'), but that’s very personal. An about with the X link sure but now it’s a snappy site indeed like Hn with my fat finger clicking to X too many times and that’s not good for retention of this one user anyway.

[gazcrisa]

I ended up following your suggestion and removed it from the navbar. Thanks again, looks cleaner.

[gazcrisa]

Thanks for this feedback! I will remove it or place it in the contact page. You're right that was sort of a dumb move on my part.

[peteforde]

Hi Crisa!

Your site looks good, but it's a bit quiet. A huge part of the appeal of HN is the high quality people making high quality contents. It's very hard to launch a site like this from a cold start. HN was able to do it because it was an extension of the YC incubator.

Unfortunately, a lot of folks are going to think "isn't Hacker News the newsboard for AI and robotics?"

There is a not small amount of truth to that. Sometimes writing the code is the easy part.

[gazcrisa]

Yeah I agree with you. But I have to start somewhere. I thought I would launch this site and learn everything I can from it. Including how to grow it organically. Even if its a failure, I will still know a little more than I did before.

But I realize what you say is true, after all I have pretty much copied HackerNews to the best of my ability, so I'm assuming users will think to themselves, why not just stick to the original HackerNews?

[peteforde]

Honestly, the real payoff for this project is the experience of building it! I think that you did a great job.

Either way, welcome to the HN community.

[gazcrisa]

Thank you! And thanks for the feedback.

[peteforde]

I did sign up, and I'll try to post a few things.

[gus_massa]

Which language did you use?

Are you triying to send trafic from the newleter to the new site? The initial comunity of HN were the readers of Paul Graham, so it may be a good starting point.

[gazcrisa]

Hey! I used Typescript and the Next.js framework. Not to ask stupid questions but what do you mean by the second sentence? Reach out to Paul Graham?

I did send an email out to my subscribers about the new site this morning. My goal is to have a platform that is entirely focused on AI developments, both technical and more general "news". I also want to expand into robotics because I'm starting to pick that up as a hobby.

[gus_massa]

> Reach out to Paul Graham?

No. Sorry for been confusing.

The first hard problem of a agregator is to get an initial commuity. One solution is to have a popular blog or mailing list and try to convince the readers to be the initial comunity. It worked in HN and in Stack Overflow.

The site looks too empty. You should convince a few of your friends to make a few post/comments to make it looks more active.

[gazcrisa]

Okay sounds good. Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I just announced it a couple hours ago to my newsletter subscribers. And this is my first promotional post of it on any web platform. I suspect if I keep at it, it may gain some users - maybe not. But either way I'll chalk it up to a learning experience.

[RIMR]

These days it's also not a bad idea to generate as much content as possible first, hope people start lurking, and then gain a community organically.

People forget that the majority of every web community is invisible because they don't post.

[krapp]

It looks like it focuses on AI, so rather they should use OpenAI to generate some traffic.

[RIMR]

Any reason you named it after Generative Pre-trained Transformer specifically? Are you betting on OpenAI turning "GPT" into the next "Google" and getting ahead of the ubiquitous branding with your own site? I would be wary of using something so specific for a web site I would hope to have long-term relevance - it seems risky to brand yourself with another company's brand...

[gazcrisa]

I created the name for my newsletter when I was at a classic car show ("The Ice") in St. Moritz earlier this year. And shortly after that I started the weekday newsletter. Originally this domain just led to a static website that had a single input field where users could subscribe. But I wanted to make the landing page more interactive because I'm trying to build a community.

I appreciate your feedback. Perhaps it wasn't the smartest idea. Only time will tell.

[hlfshell]

I posted some content there; I'll hit back regularly for a few weeks to see how it grows.

I like the idea; specialized niche forums are a win for the internet. I do wish it was named something else though - especially given the additional context of robotics.

Good luck on the launch/growth!

[gazcrisa]

I saw your post, and very much appreciated it. Thanks for looking at the project for me.

[hlfshell]

Thanks for making and sharing it!

[l1am0]

Build something similarity but more focused on the deep-tech and scientific part of ML & AI: https://news.aiapipro.com/

[gazcrisa]

Very cool - it looks awesome. Can I ask for advice on how you grow a user base?

[l1am0]

Continuously deliver good service and promote it wherever you see fit (me in this thread)

Sorry, no real growth-hack or anything that I can give :/ Just trying my best and hustle

[blotato]

How are you populating the content? How will you plan to stimulate discussion?

[gazcrisa]

I have no idea to be honest. My plan was to post it here, announce it to my newsletter, and then list it on Product Hunt, and then work on remaining features like recursive comments, and address any feedback I get from users. Do you have any advice on how to grow a webapp?

I will be posting my own posts on it just because I write a weekday newsletter, and so I am constantly searching for more information. I think there's a chance some people may look at my site, because there are many other people who have AI newsletters who need to source their information from somewhere. I suspect many are like me and keep an eye on HackerNews for interesting posts, as well as various subreddits, and Twitter, and other misc. sites.

[imarkphillips]

Hey Crisa. Great job

Are you going to publish how you made the site?

Content aggregation of niche topics can be hard as many trusted sources also publish non-niche topics.

And untrusted sources can publish gens of wisdom occasionally too.

[gazcrisa]

Thank you for the feedback! I wasn't sure if people would be interested in how I made it. But yes I could publish that. I used the Next.js framework because I didn't want to set up an entire backend server in a separate repo. Besides that, I just inspected HackerNews's frontend code in Chrome Dev Tools to copy the simple UI/UX of this magnificent site!

Now I need to learn how to make the site better and gather more people. I am working on deeply nested comments right now and an RSS feed.

[RecycledEle]

Looks interesting. I will spend time there.

[gazcrisa]

Thank you for your interest

[gumballindie]

That’s perfect - now only if ai spam could move over there.

[brianjking]

Great work! Thanks!

[indigo0086]

Is there an rss feed?

[gazcrisa]

No :( I am working on adding one right now (tonight). It will probably be up at the latest, by the end of the week (because I have a normal day job - I can only work on this project in the evenings). I'm not sure if you were the person who wrote me via email, but I took the suggestion to heart.

[romseb]

emergentmind.com was presented here on HN, too, which had a similar concept in the beginning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35356928

[gazcrisa]

I just checkout emergentminds, and subsequently bookmarked it. I like this guys UI/UX and concept. Thanks for sharing.