I'm excited about this idea. I don't like using non-open source thing because I like to know that I'm investing in something which I can tweak and contribute to. Open source is all around a better idea.
I also like the idea of using on-prem models. As open source LLMs get better and hardware gets cheaper, I can see being able to use local models being the winning advantage.
I had a feeling it was going to be mentioned that I need to delegate the marketing a partner. Does this mean that for anything to be successful one must need a partner to complete the other half (or be superman and be good at both)?
I have no idea. I am a fledgling entrepreneur who is figuring all this out for myself. I do find it easier to have a partner who complements my own skill sets and frees me up to do what I am good at. I have seen plenty of examples of people who have gone solo and done well but it comes down to you. If you have aspirations of building quality products and solely focusing on that without concern for marketing, then I think a partner helps immensely. Even the best products need to break through the cacophony of the internet to find their users and good team members (whether partners, or employees) can be really useful to help you understand how to reach people.
* I made the background not white, which seemed to be hard on the eyes; I decided to keep the color scheme from orignal HN.
* Changed vote button icon; moved point count together with the button.
* Moved comments from the right to the left, closer to the link and vote button. Reason: it's too important of an element to have it be all on the very far right.
* Moved less important content (time and poster) to the far right.
* Internal stuff: I'm using localStorage APIs to cache the data I'm scrapping from a third party hackernews API source. This is because the source kept getting hiccups.
Here are my questions to the rest of those who are still interested in this endeavor:
Should I go with grey text on white, or black text on tanish grey (like it is now)?
Are the icons too distracting? Are they good, or would you suggest I do something else? Maybe I should ditch the orange background on these icons, and go with orange text when mousing over the buttons?
Some idea I have planned:
* Search field in header
* Automatic next page loading with ---page n--- separators (if I can get this to work with the API I'm using)
* Replace submit button with a visually persistent composer item.