About
The Hacker's Directory is a collection of personal homepages collected from Hacker News. The links have not been vetted, but they are searchable. The site tracks clicks on the homepage and likes for each link. This app uses local cookies for necessary performance and data storage, such as persisting like state across your visits. None of this information is used to profile or identify you.
The data collected from this site is yours to use with attribution. It is governed by the MIT license. You can view the license in its entirety on the GitHub.
Be warned. None of these links have been vetted. Visit them with the expected sense and caution you'd use navigating to any unknown site.
Why Build This Site?
I built this site because I love the IndiWeb. I love the idea of people just making websites for the fun of it. I read a lot of People and Blogs because blogging is still the most portable and honest way to express ourselves. If I'm looking for something specific, I'll use Marginalia.nu.
I also wanted a challenge. I've never vibe coded an app before. You may roll your eyes at that for a variety of reasons, but with this unimportant small project, I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to see just how good agents have gotten. The rules: I can't write any code by hand. Every LOC would have to be written by AI. I would still be overseeing and steering the agents. This app would be mine by design and function, but without me actually writing the scraper, webserver, or SQL myself.
Would I recommend you building your next app this way? Maybe? If you know how to code already and could build the app by hand, my answer is a cautious yes. I watched Claude like a hawk, manually approving every edit while I worked on setting up the deployment and figuring out how this app would work. Claude didn't really make any decisions beyond what code to write. If that's you, then this is the fastest way to build a website bar none.
If you do not know how to code, or don't think you could build your project by hand if you had no access to AI, I'd say go ahead and try. AI is like a really smart but clumsy intern. You can get a lot out of it, but there's no guarantee it won't make mistakes or give you bad output. You need to be capable of reviewing its decisions if you want a working app in the long run.
How Does This Work?
A less sanctimonious goal of mine was to make this site cost as little as possible. The database is free and hosted by Neon. The site itself is written in TypeScript and ran via Deno using Fly.io. The only costs this site accumulates will be from hosting, which should be very very little if anything, and the cost of the domain $5.18 this year, renewing at $28 next. If this site is used frequently, I will renew the domain and keep it live. Otherwise next year this site will be moved to some subdomain of mine as I don't need another subscription. If you would like this site to survive, consider supporting it with a small donation.