Live data from Hacker News

Text-only CNN

lite.cnn.io

201–210 of 319 posts

Re: Text-only CNN

#201

I really miss RSS.

RSS is still available on a lot of websites ... and for the ones that aren't available using RSS, you can use a third party service that will create a feed.

Re: Text-only CNN

#203

The BBC News site used to have a wonderful text-only version which disappeared a long time ago. I still miss it. It even worked really well in lynx.

As did the CBC; it is still available but with zero content [0]. It now directs you to a bloated mobile site.

They do have RSS however [1].

[0] http://www.cbc.ca/m/text/ [1] http://www.cbc.ca/rss/

Re: Text-only CNN

#204

If someone could write a wrapper to do this with any major news website, they'd have a hugely popular and profitable product.

The problem with that is you could aggregate the links, but you can't host the content which kinda defeats the point in the first place.

Re: Text-only CNN

#205

This is what the world needs. Seriously, I hate this trend to bloat up websites with the rage of a thousand suns. There is absolutely no value, but it increases bandwith usage, load times and CPU/RAM usage. News websites having "fancy, modern" websites actually make me think less of them. Fuck this web-bloat shit. The web is broken.

Yeah, but H1 tags count as bloat now? Minimalism is subtract until it breaks, but this is broken.

Re: Text-only CNN

#206

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…

The Swedish public broadcaster still keeps their Teletext[0] service running. One of the cleanest way to get your news (especially on a TV where load times are zero). You can access it on the web as well https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

Same thing in Poland & Croatia, probably many other EU countries

Re: Text-only CNN

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so fast, feels like it's hosted locally

if you click Topics -> News[0] it takes 2.7 seconds. They should throw that subdomain behind https://memcached.org/ (and not use php lol). Unrelated, seems like I can't listen to podcasts. There's an tag (which doesn't use data unless you click on play if you set preload="none" [1]), so that's an interesting choice. $ curl http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001 [...] Total wall clock time: 2.7s $ ping thin.npr.org [...]…

"and not use php lol"

PHP has warts, but I find it unlikely that it would be the reason for a 2.7 second page load.

Re: Text-only CNN

#208

This is what the world needs. Seriously, I hate this trend to bloat up websites with the rage of a thousand suns. There is absolutely no value, but it increases bandwith usage, load times and CPU/RAM usage. News websites having "fancy, modern" websites actually make me think less of them. Fuck this web-bloat shit. The web is broken.

Yeah, but H1 tags count as bloat now? Minimalism is subtract until it breaks, but this is broken.

Yeah, without the h1 tags the headlines don't stand out from all the other content on the page.

Re: Text-only CNN

#210
post #15
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…

This reveals why I didn't see anything on my phone on first time visiting it. My browser just show a blank page, then seconds later the contents show up.

What's worse all the content is sent inline, just not as html :( Why complicate this so much?
Post reply on HN