hn.watch
hn.watch is the Hacker News front page with a short explainer video for every story. Scrimba runs it: the front page is mirrored from news.ycombinator.com every five minutes, and every video on it is a Scrimba explainer. It isn't affiliated with Y Combinator.
Watching a story
Each story row looks like it does on Hacker News, with the points, the poster, and links to the comments and the article. Click the title or the video link to watch its explainer. In the player, Full screen fills your browser window with the explainer.
Each story has one explainer, shared by everyone. The first person to open a story generates it and sees Starting the explainer… while it's built. After that, everyone else gets it instantly. If Scrimba is busy with other explainers, the page tries again after 30 seconds.
Explainers are only generated for stories on the Hacker News front page. For a story that has left it, hn.watch offers Generate it on Scrimba, which opens scrimba.com/explain with the story already filled in as a prompt. Submit it and the explainer is generated like any other you make.
What the explainer covers
hn.watch reads each story's article and its Hacker News discussion ahead of time, and the explainer is built from those two sources alone, without a web search. It's pitched at working engineers: it assumes the fundamentals and opens on the most concrete thing in the story.
When the discussion has at least ten comments, the explainer ends with a section called "What Hacker News is saying": where commenters agree, where they split, and the strongest objection anyone raises. Commenters are never named.
A story with no article is explained from its discussion. So is a story whose article hn.watch couldn't read, and the explainer says so on its first slide.
If the article can't be read and the discussion is too small to explain on its own, no explainer is made. hn.watch links you to the article and the thread instead.
Sharing a story
Each story has its own address, like hn.watch/?item=49656496, with a Copy button next to it. Under Share, as HN comment copies that link and opens the story's Hacker News thread so you can paste it there, and on X starts a post with the link.
On scrimba.com
Every hn.watch explainer is also a public explainer on scrimba.com, published by Scrimba rather than by whoever opened the story first. The story page links to it with Watch the explainer on scrimba.com.
On scrimba.com, two buttons under the title lead back: Watch on hn.watch opens the story on hn.watch, and HN discussion opens its thread on Hacker News.
The player also carries an hn.watch link, which stays when the explainer is embedded elsewhere. Where an hn.watch explainer shows up as a tile, an orange hn.watch badge on it opens the story on hn.watch.
hn.watch explainers are kept out of the community feed, so they don't crowd out what people publish.