Firehose

Blog post: Hacker News Firehose for iOS

Saturday Morning Project

Ask Claude Fable to create a custom app for browsing Hacker News by /new

Claude was able to one-shot this given a spec and screenshots.

Source here: github.com/harrisonpage/firehose-ios

Reading model is simple:

• Open the app
• Scroll from newest to oldest
• Stop when bored

Content is ephemeral. There's value in the unfiltered firehose of submissions, most are low quality but occasional gems surface.

The app talks to one external service: the Algolia HN Search API (hn.algolia.com/api/v1)

Platform

• SwiftUI, Swift concurrency (async/await), @Observable
• iPhone only, portrait only
• Frameworks: SwiftUI, LinkPresentation, SafariServices

Features

• Drop any headline where url is nil effectively removing Ask HN and text-only posts
• Killfile support by word or hostname (currently hardcoded)
• Link previews formed with available Open Graph metadata on long-press
• Menu items: Add to Reading List, Share, Open in Safari

Building

Open Firehose.xcodeproj in Xcode, or:

./build.sh              # iOS simulator
./build.sh device       # generic iOS device build

Building over SSH

A device build has to sign the app, and the signing key lives in your login keychain. In a desktop session that keychain is already unlocked; over SSH it is locked, and there is no window server to draw the unlock prompt on. The certificate is still readable — security find-identity lists it — so the setup looks fine right up until the build fails on:

<app>/Firehose.debug.dylib: errSecInternalComponent
Command CodeSign failed with a nonzero exit code

./build.sh device notices the locked keychain and asks for your macOS password before starting the build. To unlock ahead of time, or from a shell that cannot prompt:

security unlock-keychain ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain-db

The unlock holds until the keychain relocks — idle timeout, sleep, or logout — not just for one build. Set KEYCHAIN_PASSWORD if nothing is around to type it. If signing still fails the same way, the key is asking for a confirmation nobody can click; grant the codesign tools standing access once:

security set-key-partition-list -S apple-tool:,apple: -s \
    -k <password> ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain-db

Tests (killfile matching logic):

xcodebuild -project Firehose.xcodeproj -scheme Firehose \
    -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 17 Pro' test

Killfile

There is no filter UI. Rules live in Sources/Firehose/Services/Killfile.swift as a compile-time constant — edit and rebuild. Phrase rules match on token boundaries (an AI rule will not kill "Ukraine"); domain rules match label suffixes (wikipedia.org kills en.wikipedia.org but not notwikipedia.org).

License

MIT. Bundled Archivo is under the SIL Open Font License.

Thank Yous

• App Icon Generators
• Hackernews SVG Vector from the Tiny App Icons Collection
• Data comes from the Algolia HN Search API