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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

#361

Post by zamadatix »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #341
zamadatix wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sites does zoom break? I've been on a 2x DPI screen for years and never noticed anything. The web is pretty good about this, even "pixels" are actually just length units not physical pixels.

Very few work correctly with zoom. One of them is http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ And text has nothing to do with pixels, it's not raster.

Can you give an example of one that works poorly with zoom? Like I said literally all of the browsing I've done in the last couple of years on my work PC has been with 200% zoom and I've never noticed a site be broken/different to my 100% setup.

I suppose if you have e.g. a 720p screen and do 200% zoom you might run into some problems but that's got little to do with zoom and more to do with the lack of space on your screen to put content anymore.

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

#363

Post by thekyle »

a_imho wrote: post #317

Hearing the internet is not feasible without ads can't help but wonder what is the economics of running HN?

I think a lot of Y Combinator companies get preferential treatment for posts (especially job listings). So in that sense HN does have ads.

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

#364

Post by tripzilch »

Jaruzel wrote: post #285
pizza234 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, worth mentioning the insufficient formatting features. Quoting is not supported, and is quite important for forum discussions' UX.

For me, the only formatting issue is the code blocks that people use for quoting from linked articles - it doesn't wrap properly on mobile. Other than that I like the minimalism. I even think the lack of automatically quoting the parent comment is a good thing, as it forces the user to think about the part of the parent they want to quote instead of wholesale quoting it all as the lazy option. If auto-quoting existed…

The code blocks sometimes also cause horizontal scrollbars on desktop. And all they have to do is add one CSS rule (white-space:pre-wrap).

But apparently there's people who dislike wrapping code so much, that it's worth messing up the layout of a whole discussion even if only one comment has code in it (or by accident, even). Personally, I dislike horizontal scrolling much stronger (and I actually mildly prefer wrapping code, but that's taste, the horizontal scrolling is a big annoyance).

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

#365

Post by Hmaal »

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…

Does this explain why my votes on mobile often don't go through on the first click?

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

#366

Post by dredmorbius »

ttctciyf wrote: post #311
dredmorbius wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I navigate directly to old Reddit. However if links within Reddit (in comments, sidebars, wikis) specify the full domain, I end up at new reddit. I basically never ever want to be there. I've specifically not enabled JS for 'www.reddit.com' so that the site won't load, but I still have to fix URLs manually when directed there. What I'd like is for any 'www.reddit.com' I encounter on the site to be rewritten to 'old.r…

I log in to www.reddit.com, and have the "use new reddit" box unchecked. Anytime I click a link to reddit (including np.reddit links) it honours my preference of avoiding new reddit (checked just now by a quick reddit search on site:reddit.com) So maybe this is a misfeature on old.reddit.com, or you don't have the box unchecked?

As an example: visiting the Ask Historian's wiki in Old, all the links redirect to New.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/index

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

#367

Post by tripzilch »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #69
overcast wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not increasing line-height. I don't have a problem with my eyesight, I have a problem with poor typography.

And I have a problem with acres of whitespace. Here's one vote for HN to leave the line height right where it is.

> And I have a problem with acres of whitespace.

We're talking about just 1.5x line height. Which is a perfectly reasonable default for nice reading. The browsers have a lower default line height because of historical reasons, doesn't mean it's the right one. People don't use the Times font very often either.

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

#368

Post by tripzilch »

perilunar wrote: post #321

HN is pretty snappy and lightweight, but there's still quite a bit of HTML bloat that could be removed. e.g. all the nested tables, divs, classnames and padding gifs are completely unnecessary, and could be replaced by a single nested list.

If I'm interpreting this whole discussion properly, it seems that the fact that "modern web development" is bloated as hell, means that the messy table-based layout on HN is a-okay, because you really can't expect people to learn from history more than a single step back, or something.

Yes indeed, the shit that web developers were trying to get rid of around 2005-ish, is actually better than we have today on many pages.

Who are all these programmers that like bloat so much??

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

#369

Post by manigandham »

jakeogh wrote: post #328
manigandham wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't frame tags reload independently?

It's still a full page refresh but with a page within a page. Making every comment a separate iframe would make the site very resource intensive on client and server.

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

#370

Post by colejohnson66 »

acangiano wrote: post #178
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…

I have a gigabit Internet connection with top of the line laptops and Facebook still makes me wait for a second or two simply to show me 5 notifications.

You may have gigabit, but what’s your ping time?
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