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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

#191

Post by manigandham »

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #74
_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…

I assume you have JavaScript disabled, right? If so, can you give an example of a similar webpage that doesn’t reload the whole page to reflect your vote?

You're correct that when JS is disabled, any interaction requires a HTTP request from a link or form, and that does a full page reload.

However when JS and AJAX is used, it's expected that it also avoids an entire full-page HTML response that goes unused. It can easily be a 204 instead.

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

#192

Post by userbinator »

andrepd wrote: post #180
exabrial wrote: post #17

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

To a certain extent, it's developers serving themselves, not the user. Your job is not to show off the latest frameworkify.js and get internet points when you blog about it. It's also not to make your life easier (like by including a 1MB js library that saves an afternoon of your time). It's to make the user 's life better. Just do your damn job! \end{rant}

Unfortunately I suspect a lot of the decisions are driven by resume-padding, which is itself a phenomenon started by management who has no idea of the implications of using $latest_web_tech beyond the fact that it's "new and modern" asking for use of the dozen latest frameworks for everything they do.

If the companies hiring web devs changed their mindset and listing a dozen different frameworks on your resume was perceived as the negative trendchasing architecture-astronauts that such developers often turn out to be (at least in my experience), and valued simple JS skills and experience instead, I suspect websites would end up being a lot different than they are today.

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

#193

Post by Aeolun »

diminoten wrote: post #121
level09 wrote: post #113

You can redesign the website using modern technology and still make it insanely fast, probably even faster than its current state.

This, and you can get a much better mobile experience to boot, not to mention fixing dozens of errors that crop up with prolonged use of this site. Literally to post this comment, I got a, "We cannot serve requests that quickly please try again in a moment" message. Completely unnecessary in 2019, given how simple this site (as a concept) is. "I hate change" <- basically the summary of this submission, and kind of sa…

Have you ever seen a SPA redesign that actually improved the usability of the site for you?

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

#194

Post by spraak »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #63
_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…

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.

I always need to zoom to vote or collapse threads on mobile

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

#195

Post by Aeolun »

aasasd wrote: post #132

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.

I don’t understand. The collapse comment button is plenty big enough to consistently hit it every time I try.

Even if I only touch in it’s general direction my phone compensates for my fat fingers and collapses anyway.

Does this not work on other devices?

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

#196

Post by userbinator »

jasonhansel wrote: post #75
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…

Yeah, but those fixes and workarounds are only almost enough to sometimes compensate for the code bloat that the frameworks themselves have caused.

Seeing the parent post you're replying to reminds me a lot about how mainstream compiler optimisation works: create a lot of crap "unoptimised" output, then add many additional layers of complexity in an attempt to get rid of the unnecessary crap, instead of the quaint idea of simply not creating so much crap in the first place.

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many layers of indirection."

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

#197

Post by xur17 »

manigandham wrote: post #190
zeta0134 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay quick thought exercise. HN doesn't use a react framework and is quite lightweight on clientside JavaScript. How many upvotes does it take using this system before the total data size transmitted (original page + modifications) is, in sum total, larger than a fresh load of, say, Twitter? The reality is that for the bulk of users, votes are an uncommon interaction; most of us are here to read the articles and view…

It's nothing more than an extra header or query param to denote an AJAX request. Then the server can respond with an empty 200/204 status code instead of the entire HTML page. It's an hour of work and would actually save resources. None of this requires a front-end framework.

You'd need some frontend code to hide the upvote icon though.

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

#198

Post by cameronbrown »

bureaucrat wrote: post #130
level09 wrote: post #113

You can redesign the website using modern technology and still make it insanely fast, probably even faster than its current state.

Theoretically. You can but no one manages to do that!

The key is to start without JavaScript and then progressively enhance. There's very few reasons you need gigabytes of JS downloaded just to read a website.

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

#199

Post by tmh88j »

j79 wrote: post #40
exabrial wrote: post #17

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

I’m always amused when the frameworks being used advertise things like “We make coding fun!” I tend to think “but what about making the web enjoyable for the end user?”

>I’m always amused when the frameworks being used advertise things like “We make coding fun!”

I understand where they're coming from having dealt with a few legacy frameworkless spaghetti code bases that have no documentation. Give me bad code to maintain in a known framework over bad code without a framework anyday. Adding features and debugging in those conditions are no fun at all.

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

#200

Post by userbinator »

boring_twenties wrote: post #96
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)

Twitter is barely usable with JS disabled. Any time you follow a link to it you'll get a worthless interstitial "would you like to proceed to legacy twitter??" with only one button: "Yes." As of recently, if you have cookies disabled for their domain as well you'll end up in a redirect loop and never be able to see the 140 characters of text. *As for reddit though, if you log in with an account you can set it to alwa…

twitter.com -> m.twitter.com appears to be the mobile, non-JS version. (I don't use it to tweet, but I get linked to it to read some things sometimes, and that functionality works fine.)
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