Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 398 posts

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

#201

Post by userbinator »

overcast wrote: post #8

I wish they would update the line-height to something more reasonable. ~1.5x font size would be go a long way in paragraph readability. Other than that, it's fast and stable. About all I require from a forum. Edit: All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don't want to install addons/mods/hacks to fix line-height.

Edit: All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don't want to install addons/mods/hacks to fix line-height.

The line-height looks perfectly fine to me. AFAIK the HN CSS doesn't force any specific height but uses the defaults. In fact I'm sick of the "modern" absurdly-low-density design trend that just makes me need to scroll more to see less.

My browser has a zoom function, and so should yours. I don't understand the resistance against customising a site --- it is a user agent working for you, and the CSS spec even mandates a user-stylesheet (which I know some browser(s) blatantly disregard). Different users will obviously have different preferences.

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

#202

Post by userbinator »

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…

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.

That's a ratelimiting function to stop spammers and such. No one is questioning the ability of the servers to handle much higher request rates.

"I hate change"

It's "I hate useless change". What's sad about that?

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

#203

Post by NullPrefix »

sus_007 wrote: post #173
NullPrefix wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/there's/there was/ It's gone. That's why I'm posting about it.

It still displays "Load basic HTML (for slow connections)" at the right bottom section of the loading page. :/

Yes it does. Like I said in my first comment, I have to click it every time I load gmail, because "Set basic HTML as default view" is gone.

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

#204

Post by NullPrefix »

waterhouse wrote: post #155
NullPrefix wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>gmail.com -> gmail.com (HTML version) gmail used to have an option to set HTML as default, but it seems like it's gone. Only way to get HTML is to click on a link that's available during loading, nothing in the settings to make it permanent.

Just use this as your bookmark: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/

Thanks. This actually works.

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

#205

Post by noobermin »

_ps6d wrote: post #152
FreeHugs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped I have Facebook open in another window and opened the network inspector to compare it: Just moving the mouse towards the like button created 824KB of data transfer. Not sure if it is because of tracking the mouse movement or if it preloads stuff it thinks my mouse is moving towards. Or maybe it loads stuff that it would display if I h…

Sure, of course it can be much worse, and almost all other sites are. I'm just saying that HN could do it better, because there's no need for it to send a redirect or that full-page response unless the user has JS disabled. With JS, they could send a completely empty HTTP 200 response and it would work exactly the same (it does nothing with the response anyway). Right now HN is probably sending multiple gigabytes wor…

>almost all other sites are.

That's their point. You're not wrong, you can always be better, but HN is barebones compared to almost all (using the mathematical definition...alright, facetiously using it) other sites.

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

#207

Post by r00fus »

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.

On mobile, I use MiniHack (there are tons of other HN apps). On desktop, HN's interface works well enough that I don't try to mess with it.

I really wish I could do one feature on the desktop/web that mobile MiniHack.app does on mobile - to enforce all links opened launch in reader mode in Safari webview. 99% of the time that's exactly what I want when I click through.

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

#208

Post by _ps6d »

xur17 wrote: post #197
manigandham wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That frontend code already exists and does that every time you vote (line 27 of https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js). The response content isn't used for anything at all.

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

#209

Post by Springtime »

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…

The current workaround to those issues for Twitter (while it still lasts) is to set the user agent to Opera 12. To handle that for Vivaldi/Chromium I use a nice little user agent extension [1] that allows auto UA switching based on domain.

[1] https://github.com/eminentspoon/chrome-extension-useragent

Post reply on HN