Last weekend user westoncb posted[1] an app built in kotlin/swing[2]. A comment there mentioned that an electron app might be an interesting alternative, and here is the result of this last week's hackings.
It uses the firebase API underneath and elm/electron to interact with kotlin via the spark-kotlin micro rest framework. The icns were made with Adobe Illustrator.
The dmg unpacks to a whopping 250MB (since it packages the JRE in addition to all of the usual electron junk).
video link: https://www.youtube.com/embed/oQSy3SlsaHI?ecver=1
dropbox dmg link (if you wanna take it for a spin): https://www.dropbox.com/s/pzoeskdk2d04r6t/HackerDesktop.dmg?...
There are other hacker news clients that are actually well-made (like HackerWeb[3]).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425545
[2] https://github.com/westoncb/HNDesktop
edited to cleanup language