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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

#231

Post by netfl0 »

noobermin wrote: post #205
_ps6d wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He is wrong. It is not “quite bad”.

I appreciate your generosity to him but I am sad to see that is the top comment.

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

#232

Post by jdnenej »

liability wrote: post #54
rangibaby wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newspapers have always been full of ads fwiw

I'm talking beyond the matter of ads. On their websites I can use an adblocker, so in that respect the situation has actually improved. They regularly fail on basic UX. Their ability to turn a kilobyte of text into 10MB of trash is astounding, as is their ability to cripple modern computer hardware, or simply readability, with their latest 'innovations' in totally unnecessary JS/CSS fuckery. uMatrix blocking all JS,…

Reader mode on browsers is the easiest way to make news websites usable

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

#234

Post by jdnenej »

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?”

End users don't care. When they see a slow website they think "Awesome, now I have a reason to buy that new iPhone Jessica has because this one is getting slow"

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

#235

Post by jdnenej »

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}

Saving an afternoon of your time means spending an afternoon working on more things the user wants. With that logic we should be writing web apps in pure assembly to shave off as much loading time as possible despite the fact that in the time you could have built the whole application, you are still working on the login page.

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

#236

Post by jdnenej »

Aeolun wrote: post #188
muzani wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, with modern things like Webpack, minify/uglify, CDNs, web speed should be much better on low bandwidth sites compared to the past.

My parcel with a fairly simple app spits out a 10MB release build. We still have some way to go.

How many libraries did you add? Last I checked the major ones were about 1mb

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

#237

Post by _ps6d »

netfl0 wrote: post #231
noobermin wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

He is wrong. It is not “quite bad”. I appreciate your generosity to him but I am sad to see that is the top comment.

How could it possibly be considered a good thing? I've seen dang say before that they've been running into performance issues, and I bet that they'd see a significant drop in resource usage solely by not generating entire comments pages just to throw them away every time anyone votes on a comment. The response is literally not used at all, they're doing that work and sending that data for no reason.

There are multiple downsides and not a single benefit to the current method.

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

#239

Post by dwheeler »

muzani wrote: post #153
exabrial wrote: post #17

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

Honestly, with modern things like Webpack, minify/uglify, CDNs, web speed should be much better on low bandwidth sites compared to the past.

It depends on how you use it. Size matters. On a site I manage, we send about 64KB of JavaScript and we are working to make that smaller... and the main site functionality works when JavaScript is disabled.

In contrast, many sites seem to think that 1MB of JavaScript, or even 5MB, are acceptable, and they can't even show simple static content when client-side JavaScript is disabled. On a slow link, 1MB of JavaScript means that the user has probably given up. And it's not just the size. 200KB of HTML is far far faster than 200KB of JavaScript; web browsers are highly optimized for handling HTML, while processing JavaScript is necessarily much slower. JavaScript is great for some things, but like a sledgehammer it's not always the best solution. Too many people aren't considering the real end-user experience. "Pretty graphics, but it takes 5 minutes to download" is usually not a worthwhile tradeoff.

To paraphrase Goldblum:

Your web designers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could use JavaScript, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

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

#240

Post by manojlds »

FreeHugs wrote: post #85
_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…

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…

In lower internet speeds Facebook loads a lite version which is super fast (loads better than HN for me) and has most of the basic functionalities.
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