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Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

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Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#131

Post by wtallis »

turrini wrote: post #24

There should be an extension that automatically redirects common websites to their lite versions. reddit.com -> old.reddit.com facebook.com -> mbasic.facebook.com cnn.com -> lite.cnn.com npr.org -> text.npr.org twitter.com -> twitter.com (with JS disabled) gmail.com -> gmail.com (HTML version)

On Firefox I use Redirector: http://einaregilsson.com/redirector/

I have it set up to handle Reddit and Wikipedia. News sites and Twitter don't get to run JS thanks to NoScript, so I usually don't have to do anything extra to get a lightweight experience there.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#132

Post by aasasd »

I want to add particular thanks for:

- Keeping the ‘[-]’ comment collapse button minuscule on the mobile site, so that hitting it is a game of chance.

- Abstaining from adding semantic CSS class names to page elements—such that CSS selectors amount to “a table cell on the third level under this table cell.”

These two features steadily keep me from spending even more time on the site than I already do.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#133

Post by 18pfsmt »

DC-3 wrote: post #123
thrwwyw3489 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped. Dude, the time to be angry is if your sentence were: "This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10MB gzipped." [megabytes, not kilobytes] And: "As of right now, for me, voting on any comment in this thread currently causes a 14MB response and takes about 130 seconds to finish." Because that's the territo…

Since he's probably too modest to mention it himself, the user you're replying to is the founder of the news aggregator and forum site Tildes [1] which is pretty much the gold standard of modern forum site design imho. If anyone has the right to make this comment it's him. [1] https://tildes.net

>which is pretty much the gold standard of modern forum site design

Wait, what?

>open-source link aggregator with no ads or tracking (currently in invite-only alpha)

HN is over 12 years old and much larger. Suggesting an alpha-level service is the "gold standard" is pure hyperbole.

I'm not familiar with the founder, so I am not making any judgement; and, I support the basic premise of their project.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#134

Post by buybackoff »

Right now I'm traveling in a train somewhere in Smolensk region in Russia and HN is the only site I could use normally with sporadic Edge/3G. Had exactly the same thought as in the title. Thanks HN!

+1 for a dark theme though, reading from a bright screen in midnight darkness hurts eyes.

Another frequent thought I have during such trips is why so few sites have any basic offline support? E.g. while writing this I moved to offline zone and if I press 'add comment' now then most likely I will lose it. So I have to copy it and save temporarily in a GMail draft. But it would be nice if all drafts are stored in LocalStorage/IndexedDB as I type until posting is acknowledged.

Actually it is much easier to lose written text on mobile. I've just opened 5 apps that took all Android memory, which kicked Chrome from RAM and forced page reload when I returned to Chrome. The page reloaded from cache instantly, but the comment draft was lost (continuing this from GMail draft, waiting for a stable 4G at the next train station near a mid-size town).

GitHub issues comment form keeps the content if I accidentally click on a link (e.g. Pull Requests) and then return to the issue page (not just by going back, but jumping over several GH pages, e.g. Home->Repo->Issues->#issue) and such behavior is much better than an alert on tab close about unsaved content. Probably in GH case this is an accidental side effect from SPA state storage, but at least once it saved me from losing a large complex comment with links and markdown, that is how I noticed the behavior. GH still loses content on page close, but keeps it after page reload.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#135

Post by pizza234 »

_ps6d wrote: post #57

HN is lightweight in some ways, but also quite bad in others. For example, every single time you vote on anything, the site sends back a 302 redirect and then a copy of the entire page's HTML in response. This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped. As of right now, for me, voting on any comment in this thread currently causes a 14KB response and takes about 1.3 seconds to fini…

Also, worth mentioning the insufficient formatting features. Quoting is not supported, and is quite important for forum discussions' UX.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#136

Post by dmix »

wolco wrote: post #32
dmix wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern front-end toolsets are finally starting to address this by using automated critical css, SSR + "hydrating" on load for interactive elements, webpack treeshaking + chunking of assets into tiny js/css files and only loading code based on what the page/routes asks for, PurgeCSS to get rid of unused css, cssnano/uglify/htmlmin/imagemin, etc. Webpack and these various popular tools has done a lot to make the web be…

A modern css framework would increase the font size change the font type make the reply link a fat button. It would put a card around each parent reply thread. Getting rid of unused css helps but the additional markup would make the page 4 or 5 times larger.

I see a trend away from that in 'trendy' CSS frameworks like http://tachyons.io/ and https://basscss.com

The Bootstrap stuff you seem bothered by is better for splashy big-headline marketing sites not high-density content like HN.

A lof of web designers cut their teeth designing marketing websites, not app UIs, so it's not surprising when I see it mindlessly used on sites like Reddit's new redesign.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#137

Post by lukas099 »

18pfsmt wrote: post #125
thrwwyw3489 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped. Dude, the time to be angry is if your sentence were: "This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10MB gzipped." [megabytes, not kilobytes] And: "As of right now, for me, voting on any comment in this thread currently causes a 14MB response and takes about 130 seconds to finish." Because that's the territo…

> It should use 5-50 megabytes of data per page load. Mandatory min of 5MB vs. current 10KB? I'm pretty sure I'm missing the logic here. I sometimes rely on a satellite connection in my access, and I don't hold HN responsible for that fact. I do agree that no anger is merited (nor sane).

Sarcasm

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#138

Post by eurasiantiger »

deftturtle wrote: post #110
robocat wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related question: what is the easiest way to increase the tap zone of a HTML element using CSS? Aside: I have noticed Safari auto-inceases the touch zone for inputs and elements with ontouch/onclick events (I noticed because I had to fix an issue caused by this!)

a {padding: 1rem} This increases area by padding the link. Just don’t want the rap areas of different elements to overlap with too much padding. You can also put a border around the new area, or a box shadow, to indicate larger click area, making it a button sort of: {border: thin solid grey}

Note that the element is inline by default, which means top and bottom padding is not applied. Set display: inline-block; to have padding apply all around while retaining the element’s flow in the layout.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#139

Post by mistersys »

exabrial wrote: post #17

I loathe the modern web. Speed is a secondary to "hey look what we're doing with our frameworks".

I understand where this is coming from, however whenever I interact with a app that re-loads the whole window on every major interaction, I start getting frustrated because of the jarring, slow transitions, most modern web apps are faster after the initial page load, albiet on my 15" 2018 MacBook Pro.

Stop blaming the modern web. There are plenty of slow PHP and rails sites and plenty of slow React based sites. Of course speed is second priority, I'd much rather have users using my app with a mediocre experience than nobody using my app. However, as the web supports more tooling and frameworks continue to evolve towards web assembly, I believe will start to have web apps approaching native speed.

The reality is that requiring a server to render every page limits what you can do with your app. Even if modern tooling is overused, developers will always move towards what allows you to do more.

I'd much rather focus on making modern tooling faster than complaining about the modern web.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#140

Post by ebg13 »

graeme wrote: post #78
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When reading on an iPad, tapping on links is nearly impossible. A better responsive CSS file wouldn't make the site any slower or degrade the experience for laptop users.

What do you mean? Haven't had that issue. Am on desktop version, unsure if mobile exists

All elements are super tiny unless you force zoom on them. The CSS says that all fonts are 10pt or _smaller_. There are 7pt fonts defined in there! Everything else is specified in exact pixels. Vote arrows are 10x10 pixels. Do you realize how small 10x10 pixels is on a modern display?
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