Text-only CNN • Hacker News Board

Re: Text-only CNN

#41

Post by SubiculumCode » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 5:15 AM UTC

When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it.

The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then:

The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs.

HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense, and does what it needs to do.

Re: Text-only CNN

#42

Post by gfyrt » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 5:21 AM UTC

ascom wrote: post #3

EDIT: As I wrote this, someone deployed a server-side rendered version of the site. Now the site is perfect. :) This site appears to load ~350 KB of JavaScript, which I think is a bit excessive for a "lite" text-only site. From the sourcemaps, I found a long list of libraries, including: * react * redux * redux-thunk * react-router * axios * base64-js (why not window.atob/btoa?) * core-js * fbjs * react-hot-loader (s…

Trump literally effected CNN to consider human tolerancy to their questinable content!

Re: Text-only CNN

#43

Post by B-Con » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 5:22 AM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #12

DalekBaldwin wrote: post #8

My laptop can run computationally-intensive physics simulations and play streaming hi-def video with no problem, but if I click a link to a mainstream news article it just about keels over and dies. How did our grandparents ever manage to load the news on an underpowered machine called "paper"?

It works like a gas; the performance-sapping computations on the articles expand until they fill up all available human latency tolerance.

That and the abomination of the technology stack that we use for said process. HTML/CSS/JS is absolutely not the answer for "I want to make a UI", never mind the fact that many UI designers have no clue how the stack works and abuse it horribly.

The idea may be "paper", but what's actually being done is far from it. The browser may paint and repaint a pixel a dozen times before it's ever rendered. DOM-traversal is one of the most important parts of a browser's optimization because of the tens of thousands of times it can happen to paint a screen.

Re: Text-only CNN

#44

Post by hossbeast » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 5:22 AM UTC

pls2halp wrote: post #18

mixmastamyk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try noscript, ghostery, or the other one that escapes me at the moment. News sites in general have about twenty JavaScript ad trackers on them each.

There's also Ublock Origin(general ad block, with highly granular options), and Privacy Badger.

Not to mention the Brave browser

Re: Text-only CNN

#45

Post by skookumchuck » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 5:23 AM UTC

rmetzler wrote: post #32

skookumchuck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My computer's speakers are not plugged in. Problem solved.

Some people use laptops.

The speakers can often be disabled by plugging a wire that goes nowhere into the line out jack.

Re: Text-only CNN

#46

Post by eggs_and_avo » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 5:26 AM UTC

Great. Now we could structure the text with a markup language and syndicate it. Anyone could consume these syndicated feeds using a variety of free apps. We could even standardize this and call it... RSS :)

Re: Text-only CNN

#47

Post by SubiculumCode » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 5:28 AM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #41

When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it. The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then: The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs. HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense…

I'd add that Google News used to have that clean feel too, many years ago. Each generation it gets worse. The latest generation using AMP is nearly unreadable on my Nexus 5 phone, it bogs it to a crawl.

Re: Text-only CNN

#48

Post by banned1 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 5:28 AM UTC

If only CNN would go back to being the old but trusted, amazing CNN, with Christiane Amanpour at the landing in Mogadishu during Restore Hope, or Bernie Shaw at the hotel in Baghdad for Desert Storm.

Now, a shell of its old self, CNN is just MSNBC's cousin, with people who say "we, ahem, I mean, the Democrats, are losing Michigan" live on screen.

Oh well. It's been years since I relied on CNN.

But on the technical front, good for them.

Re: Text-only CNN

#49

Post by dredmorbius » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 5:31 AM UTC

Osiris wrote: post #19

The absolute worst thing about cnn.com is the auto-playing videos. I've been in quiet places and clicked a CNN news link only to have a video start blasting on the speakers. It's not only annoying but a huge waste of mobile bandwidth. Now I just need an extension that rewrites all CNN urls to this site.

I've got specific dnsmasq block rules for those.

    0.0.0.0 ht1.cdn.turner.com      # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 ht2.cdn.turner.com      # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 ht3.cdn.turner.com      # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 ht4.cdn.turner.com      # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 ht5.cdn.turner.com      # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 ht6.cdn.turner.com      # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 ht7.cdn.turner.com      # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 ht8.cdn.turner.com      # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 ht9.cdn.turner.com      # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 a.teads.tv              # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 t.teads.tv              # Autoplay video
    0.0.0.0 cdn.teads.tv            # Autoplay video

Not all those hosts are populated yet, but this is effective.

Re: Text-only CNN

#50

Post by na85 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 5:31 AM UTC

jordache wrote: post #29

ascom wrote: post #3

EDIT: As I wrote this, someone deployed a server-side rendered version of the site. Now the site is perfect. :) This site appears to load ~350 KB of JavaScript, which I think is a bit excessive for a "lite" text-only site. From the sourcemaps, I found a long list of libraries, including: * react * redux * redux-thunk * react-router * axios * base64-js (why not window.atob/btoa?) * core-js * fbjs * react-hot-loader (s…

WTF? why any JS at all for something that's pure content?

History repeats itself. This is just like flash sites back in the 90s.