alt.hn

7/29/2026 at 2:13:54 PM

Show HN: The Federalist Papers, typeset as the 1787 newspapers they ran in

by vhwalke

7/29/2026 at 5:40:21 PM

Lovely project, I've given it a skim and I quite like the presentation.

The only thing that I would work on would be to rewrite a lot of the website copy since it's a bit heavy with the llm-isms, which gives it an unfortunate sheen.

If theres a repo link, I'd be happy to contribute, since I realize it's no small task.

by Unearned5161

7/29/2026 at 6:54:14 PM

Completely a fair point. Definitely was heavily, heavily AI built (including the copy) - there is no way I could have justified putting in the time it would have taken to build this for a "pro-bono" project pre AI! Even with AI, I've spent a considerable amount of time steering, editing, and revising (including some of the most egregious AI adds).

Would absolutely appreciate edits and revisions. Repository here:

https://github.com/vwalke/federalist-papers-reader

Thanks for the feedback! Vann

by vhwalke

7/29/2026 at 7:34:12 PM

I totally understand, thanks for sharing the repo, I'll do my best to pitch in. Always happy to support making history more accessible!

by Unearned5161

7/29/2026 at 7:59:17 PM

Really hugely appreciated. I'm doing an AI pass at removing some more of the AI-ism's. It came up with some good suggestions. I'm reviewing and should have those in before long. I'm sure it won't be complete, but might give a better starting point.

Thanks again!

by vhwalke

7/29/2026 at 2:16:04 PM

Hi HN,

I made this. It started as a weekly reading project with my mother: one Federalist paper a week. I couldn't find an online edition that was actually pleasant to read - most are walls of text or scanned PDFs - so I built one.

It's all 85 essays with the original wording (text from the Project Gutenberg edition, publication dates checked against the Library of Congress record and Founders Online), set the way they first appeared: as essays in the New York newspapers of 1787–88, under the pen name "Publius." There's also a clean modern reading mode if the facsimile isn't your thing.

The part this crowd might like: the justified text uses Knuth–Plass line-breaking (via a small library called justif - which I found here on HN!), with hanging punctuation and optical margin alignment, set in the IM Fell types. No ads, no accounts, no tracking; reading progress is stored locally on your own device.

It's free and the text is public domain. I'd genuinely welcome feedback on the reading experience.

(It was recently featured on kottke.org, which is the only reason I'm brave enough to post it here.)

by vhwalke