What is visual-hn?

Visual HN is a small backend service that sits in front of an existing Hacker News clone site called hcker.news and adds visual context to its list of stories. Normally Hacker News style feeds show just plain text links and titles. This project fetches a preview image and description for each linked article, using a web standard called Open Graph metadata that many sites already provide for link previews, and then injects that information into the page you see. Beyond adding thumbnails and descriptions, the service also tracks how each story's position on the list changes over time, showing whether a story is rising, falling, or holding steady, and marks top performers with medal style indicators. All of this information is also made available through an API that a companion browser extension uses to overlay the enriched feed directly on top of the original site. Under the hood it runs on Python using the FastAPI web framework, storing data in a SQLite database accessed asynchronously. For fetching pages and images reliably, it uses tools that mimic real browser behavior to avoid being blocked, along with a headless Chrome fallback for trickier cases. The project also includes an older, now retired, standalone HTML frontend built with Tailwind CSS, though the main way to use it today is through the browser extension paired with the live proxy. Setting it up requires a Linux server, specifically documented for Ubuntu, along with Python 3.10 or newer. After cloning the repository and installing dependencies in a virtual environment, you start it locally and browse to a local address to see the enriched feed. The browser extension is loaded separately as an unpacked extension in Chrome or Edge developer mode. A live version of the service is running publicly for anyone who wants to try it without setting anything up themselves. The project is open source under the MIT license, and the author notes ongoing development is focused on refining the core proxy, the preview images, and the underlying API.