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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

#301
post #291
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they're already using javascript, and the issue is the backend response, so this would only be a backend optimization then and doesn't require any fancy frameworks?

No, It’s not needed. I have been using it without javascript for years.

You aren’t understanding the person you’re replying to.

No one is contesting that HN can work without JS. But for those who have JS enabled, it uses JS. For these people the optimisation could be implemented.

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

#302
post #289
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 is probably the reason upvotes still work with javascript dissabled. It’s a feature.

Sending the same reply regardless of whether the user is using Js or not is not a feature. It's lazy. You wouldn't even need to change a single thing about the front end to fix this on the back end, since the js request via Ajax already has an additional header field (x-sent-via: Xmlhttprequest or something along the lines). This might be as simple as wrapping output generation in a single if-statement.

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

#303

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.

No need for custom header or query param, Ajax (xmlhttp) requests already have an extra header field set automatically, so all is needed is some if statement server side, assuming registering the upvote and rendering the page is not entangled in some super crazy way.

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

#304
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 had the same issue on mobile. Annoyed me so much, I made a browser extension that increases the padding around those and the collapse buttons. Not useful for you, but for anyone using Firefox for Android, see here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sihn/

(It could use some tweaks to keep everything aligned, but the small usability tweak was most important to me.)

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

#305
post #194

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.

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

Yes, me too. I suggested adding more spacing between upvote / downvote links for usability on mobile.

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

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can set "Use new Reddit as my default experience ". At the bottom of the page, "beta options". https://old.reddit.com/prefs/ There is no "always use old reddit"

If you uncheck that box though, you will always be taken to old Reddit unless you specifically go to new.reddit.com

It's _meant_ to do that, but from personal experience (and one that from what I've seen others share), keeping old Reddit enabled is extremely finnicky (apparently it's an issue with the way their server handles the old/new check) and it'll randomly switch to new Reddit.

I personally wound up using an extension[1] to keep old Reddit active, which so far has taken care of the weird behavior.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redir...

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

#307
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.

This. Please spend a little more time on the css. And a somewhat bigger up/downvote arrow would be great. I don’t have fat fingers but still accidentally click the wrong one every now and then.

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

#308
post #207

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.

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.

I just use a bookmarklet to increase the font size. It requires an extra tap, but I'd rather do that than use an app.

The bookmarklet:

  javascript:(function()%7Bvar%20n=window.document.createElement(%22style%22);n.setAttribute(%22type%22,%22text/css%22);n.innerText=%22html%7Bfont-size:1.2em!important;line-height:1.3!important;%7Dbody,table,tr,td,.default,.comment,.comhead,.pagetop,span.pagetop%20b,.c00,.yclinks%7Bfont-size:inherit!important;line-height:inherit!important;%7D.pagetop,.title%7Bfont-size:1.2em!important;%7Dtable%23hnmain%7Bwidth:100%25!important;%7Dbody%7Bmargin:0;%7D%22;window.document.head.appendChild(n)%7D)()

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

#309
post #220
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No one said anything about SPAs. You can keep the site modern whilst still serving content in separate pages with a little JavaScript here and there. Being ideologically against any and every form of JavaScript is being pretentious and holier-than-thou. As for concrete examples of the above, see lobste.rs for an excellent interface that's still minimal and responsive. Typing this comment on HN took me to a separate H…

> No one said anything about SPAs. You can keep the site modern whilst still serving content in separate pages with a little JavaScript here and there.

But that's not modern web development, that's jQuery-style coding. Modern web development is about heavyweight SPA frameworks like React or Angular.

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

#310

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…

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

Might work with internet explorer too. On ie11 mobile I always instantly get the static twitter page. Loads way faster than the modern Js version on my note 7 which has four times the ram and twice as many CPU cores. It's both hilarious and sad.
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