The author discussed the project and a fair amount of internals in the JS Jabber podcast a couple months ago. Very recommended: http://javascriptjabber.com/077-jsj-monocle-with-alex-maccaw...

It looks like a good example of how to structure and write clean apps in Sinatra.

Somehow I don't find the typography satisfying. It is hard to read and explore the titles. HN does a better job at this even though your site looks prettier.

The same goes for telesc.pe mentioned by sgdesign.

Could that also be because you're so used to HN's design that it's easier to identify key elements?

Helvetica Neue at that font weight needs a larger size for legibility. See Parse using the same font in their docs at 16px[0]. [0] https://parse.com/docs/js_guide

Always nice to see more HN-style open-source apps. I hope if it's alright if I plug mine, an HN clone built with Meteor:

http://telesc.pe

And by the way, if you like this kind of layout with the link on the left, this alternative HN user interface is very well made: http://hn.premii.com/

I like it a lot but there seems to be some performance problem when you have a couple of comments there, for example http://demo.telesc.pe/posts/a05eba73-cdd9-4d64-933d-2586ffc5... takes a couple of seconds to load on my 27" iMac in Firefox and even shows me the beachball of death for a couple of seconds before it gets rendered. It only has 335 comments.

hmmmm if the wait is being caused by processing of the heavy meteor frontend code, as I suspect, then "it works fine for me" is actually an indictment, and "it's on a free server" is no defense.

Do you know of any alternatives that has a browser-plugin similar to getpocket.com or sendtoinc.com?

This looks cool. Something that we can run internally as an alternative to our "Links Thread" on mail.