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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

#261

Post by SiebenHeaven »

baby wrote: post #259
r00fus wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Paying to browse a free website? Check premii

Seems significantly slower to me on my 3G network compared to hn

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

#262

Post by nojvek »

I use hn.algolia.com and it’s fantastic.

With HN as is, I think plenty can be done to make it light weight and make it even more performant.

E.g HN isn’t a progressive web app. So you’re loading the same things over and over again. With a service worker HN could teach even more people around the world with a spotty connection.

May be I should prototype and build it.

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

#263

Post by liability »

jdnenej wrote: post #232
liability wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can often get the text of the article in Emacs, so I generally do that. My TTS integration is better in Emacs than Firefox anyway, so I actually prefer it for longer reading.

But regardless of our personal work-arounds or workflows, those websites shouldn't be like that. The general public is still subjected to the default experience and that bothers me.

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

#265

Post by JaRail »

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…

The actual like is pretty small, about half a KB. Just a light graphql query that responds with updated counts for different reactions (happy/sad/etc). They definitely batch it with some other stuff though. Batching is really important for browser performance.

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

#266

Post by csande17 »

nojvek wrote: post #262

I use hn.algolia.com and it’s fantastic. With HN as is, I think plenty can be done to make it light weight and make it even more performant. E.g HN isn’t a progressive web app. So you’re loading the same things over and over again. With a service worker HN could teach even more people around the world with a spotty connection. May be I should prototype and build it.

> E.g HN isn’t a progressive web app. So you’re loading the same things over and over again. With a service worker HN could teach even more people around the world with a spotty connection.

Hacker News uses standard HTTP headers to cache all its CSS, JavaScript, and images. The only thing that gets re-downloaded when you click a link is the actual text content on the page -- usually about ten kilobytes. And isn't that almost always what you want, to make sure you see the latest posts, comments, and vote counts?

Because it's standard HTML, Hacker News also works with existing features like Chrome for Android's "download page when back online" button.

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

#267

Post by boring_twenties »

userbinator wrote: post #200
boring_twenties wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Hm, so maybe all I need is an extension to rewrite twitter links to the mobile version. Will look into, thanks!

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

#269

Post by csande17 »

dmix wrote: post #86
jasonhansel wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

People seem to be confusing web 2.0/bootstrap style design (see: Reddit's bad redesign) with the frameworks here but the component based approach combined with webpack/compilation steps, which are very much mainstreaming, are fundamentally different than top heavy JS frameworks I spent most of the last decade using. I dont think people have really seen what server-side rendering (ala Next.js/Nuxt.js), decoupled compo…

I think you and the parent commenter are coming at this from fundamentally different perspectives.

The parent commenter remembers a time when websites were server-rendered by default. The server would send down HTML, along with a small amount of CSS and JavaScript to style it and add interactivity. You didn't need an elaborate chain of compilers and bundlers and frameworks and chunkers to make sure you didn't ship several megs of dead code to the client; you just didn't ship several megs of dead code to the client. That's their baseline for web performance.

Your comment, on the other hand, seems to use the current giant-JavaScript-framework sites as the baseline for performance. And yeah, you can get a lot of cheap wins if you start from there. (For starters, you can break up your JavaScript execution into tiny slices so that, even if you're using 80% of a CPU core and draining the user's battery for no real reason, you're at least not blocking the browser UI thread.)

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

#270

Post by csande17 »

171243 wrote: post #260
samtheprogram wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's implemented this way for balance of a simple implementation and how lightweight it is. Not to mention, there is at least one benefit: the voting mechanism doesn't depend on JavaScript. And if you are not authenticated, you are instead taken to a login page. Logging in then gives you the redirect and the upvote is registered.

So just to clarify, this behavior seems to be by design. In that case it does seem the original comment is objectively wrong if the code is readable and maintainable and accomplishes the desired behavior.

As parent comments mention, sending back the whole-page response when you vote on a comment is a great idea if you have JavaScript disabled or aren't logged in.

But it'd be a quick performance win if it didn't do that when you were logged in with JavaScript enabled. The actual JavaScript part of this is actually already implemented -- that's why the page doesn't refresh when you upvote my comment -- so you'd just need one if-statement on the server side to send a blank response instead of a redirect.

Sure, 10 KB of download and the server CPU time needed to re-generate the listing page is probably pretty negligible, but multiply that by the number of votes casted on Hacker News every day and it starts to add up.

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