Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

#11

Post by rolltiide » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

llamathrowaway wrote: post #3

> There is also a GET request to https://news.ycombinator.com/collapse?id=1234567 to save the state of the collapsed/expanded comment if the user is logged in, but it's an async request so it doesn't have an impact. Is this a correct place to use 'GET'?

why not store this state client-side?

Re: Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

#12

Post by kawsper » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

rolltiide wrote: post #11

llamathrowaway wrote: post #3

> There is also a GET request to https://news.ycombinator.com/collapse?id=1234567 to save the state of the collapsed/expanded comment if the user is logged in, but it's an async request so it doesn't have an impact. Is this a correct place to use 'GET'?

why not store this state client-side?

I might visit Hackernews using multiple user-agents.

Re: Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

#13

Post by RBenjamin » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

Or just use my Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey plugin which disables the Hackernews collapsible comments and introduces its own collapsible comments logic, which is much faster and has a variety of convenience features:

http://mental-reverb.com/creations.php

Re: Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

#14

Post by jimbob45 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

mda wrote: post #8

nicolaslem wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me HN is a great reminder that done is better than perfect.

More like, "It kinda works, we don't give a crap".

The Craigslist special

Re: Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

#15

Post by abakker » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

I am just now realizing that HN comments are collapsible...I wonder if anyone has ever looked at upvote/scroll behavior when the collapse button is used vs not? There are a ton of threads where the top comment is also a non-sequitur, but I know when that happens I frequently don't scroll past the hundreds of replies to see what the other first level comments are.

Re: Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

#16

Post by pg_bot » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

I would use the tag to solve this problem. Most people don't know this exists and I have no idea why. You would probably have to rewrite the html so it no longer uses tables but I don't really consider that to be a negative.

I would also question why we are saving collapsed comments. I feel like this is something that doesn't need to be persisted forever. If you want this behavior why not use local storage instead?

Re: Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

#17

Post by enriquto » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

I cannot visually notice any delay. It seems instantaneous in my browser.

Re: Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

#18

Post by gowld » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

I suspect the pg answer to this question is "there's too much noise on some posts, and deterring interaction with posts of 300+ comments is a feature, not a bug.

Re: Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

#19

Post by bm5k » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

kawsper wrote: post #12

rolltiide wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not store this state client-side?

I might visit Hackernews using multiple user-agents.

is cross-session comment folding really that important/neat?

Re: Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow?

#20

Post by kabwj » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

It’s fast on Safari mobile but very slow on Firefox desktop. Goes to show many things.