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Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

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Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#111

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

thesephist wrote: post #58
self_awareness wrote: post #55

It hangs on "reading stories". Web app authors can be very creative, but one thing I don't like about web apps is that often their error handling is nonexistent. It's not about individual authors; behemots like Microsoft also do this in an irritating way: "Something did not work. Reload the page please" -- Is this really the best a billion dollar company can do? Well, I suppose this is still better than no error at a…

It actually does handle errors properly -- the reddit api is probably blocked for you, which is why it hangs and can't do anything. I suppose I could have added a "it seems we can't reach Reddit" kind of message, but that would still have been an error state, and in rushing this out in an afternoon it wasn't much of a priority. Didn't realize until posting here that apparently Firefox blocks the reddit api from the b…

Hanging or crashing without feedback is pretty much "not handling errors".

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#112

Post by kmstout »

A long time ago, when I was more of a news junky, I wrote some scripts to pull from various RSS feeds (BBC, Financial Times, Jane's, and one or two others), crack out the text of recent items, and format into a five-column, landscape-oriented PDF, with nice headlines, table of contents, etc. A cron job would see to running the pipeline every morning and emailing the result to me. When I got to work, I would print it out and read it on breaks throughout the day, crossing off items once I read them or decided they weren't relevant. With a red pen, I could also mark it up and make small notes on interesting items.

Curl, BeautifulSoup, and Latex. Great fun.

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#113

Post by bentcorner »

ape4 wrote: post #88
bonoboTP wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They (MS etc) know the error alright, but users get scared and overwhelmed by technical language and error messages. So they put some picture of a sad cat and a message like "zoinks, that didn't work, try again". And anyway, if you're going to reload anyway, why would you care about the exact error? Hopefully it got logged in their systems so the engineers can come back to it. Beyond nerd curiosity, why would a user…

How about the diagnostic tool you can launch in Windows. It works away for 5 minutes then says it couldn't fix it.

Are you talking about the Windows Error Reporting tool? It can occasionally work (I was notified once that a crashing driver had an update to fix the crash I ran into). Most of the time the crash/hang data is used to prioritize fixes in a later release.

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#114

Post by eitland »

thesephist wrote: post #93
StrangeSound wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't load for me in Chrome either. In the function fetchRedditStories , it looks like that the callback param in the catch is named `e`, but it tries to log `error`. Checking the network panel I'm getting a 200, but I'm pretty sure it's failing anyway because of the ReferenceError

Darn, can't believe I didn't catch that typo until now. I don't think that was the issue -- unbound variables don't cause exceptions in JS until that variable is dereferenced -- but not sure what else it could be if the reddit api hit is succeeding with a 200. Maybe a wonky JSON Decode?

> Darn, can't believe I didn't catch that typo until now. I don't think that was the issue -- unbound variables don't cause exceptions in JS until that variable is dereferenced

The underlying problem here is using Javascript instead of TypeScript.

And of course under that problem there's the problem of Javascript bit being TypeScript in the first place.

(Not a bad word about Brendan Eich though, considering that the language was created by one man in three weeks it is amazing, but it is still sad that we ended up with an untyped language in such a critical place.)

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#117

Post by self_awareness »

bonoboTP wrote: post #84
self_awareness wrote: post #55

It hangs on "reading stories". Web app authors can be very creative, but one thing I don't like about web apps is that often their error handling is nonexistent. It's not about individual authors; behemots like Microsoft also do this in an irritating way: "Something did not work. Reload the page please" -- Is this really the best a billion dollar company can do? Well, I suppose this is still better than no error at a…

They (MS etc) know the error alright, but users get scared and overwhelmed by technical language and error messages. So they put some picture of a sad cat and a message like "zoinks, that didn't work, try again". And anyway, if you're going to reload anyway, why would you care about the exact error? Hopefully it got logged in their systems so the engineers can come back to it. Beyond nerd curiosity, why would a user…

the problem is that most of the time I'm reloading the page and exact same error appears. With more details I could troubleshoot the problem, but with errors like that I'm just closing the tab/windows app and I'm starting writing rants about it on the internet :D

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#118

Post by vmception »

self_awareness wrote: post #55

It hangs on "reading stories". Web app authors can be very creative, but one thing I don't like about web apps is that often their error handling is nonexistent. It's not about individual authors; behemots like Microsoft also do this in an irritating way: "Something did not work. Reload the page please" -- Is this really the best a billion dollar company can do? Well, I suppose this is still better than no error at a…

Everything you wrote is wrong and you've clearly been trying to support that pre-existing conclusion for years.

It has an error. Report the bug. Hope it gets fixed. The end.

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#119

Post by TheKarateKid »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #38

It’s very interesting from a psychological standpoint: the current front page headline (for me?) is “Planets and dwarf planets to scale in size, rotation speed, axial tilt and oblateness (numbered in distance order from Sun)” If I were reading this on /r/dataisbeautiful, I’d immediately parse and grok the headline just fine. But with this, my mindset was on the reporting of actions or events and I read “to scale” as…

This just happened to me with the top headline being: Birthdates of US servicemen drafted into the Vietnam War as a result of birthdate lotteries held in 1969, 1970 and 1971

I had to read it like a first grader and think about it to understand that it was just a label for a chart and NOT a headline of an action.

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