Show HN: HNText – Top stories daily cleaned for readability
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Show HN: HNText – Top stories daily cleaned for readability
#2Interesting idea, http://www.hntext.com/#543c2fd8ba03530200000008 has "broken" special characters though.
Re: Show HN: HNText – Top stories daily cleaned for readability
#3This is absolutely horrible and shows complete lack of respect for copyright. It should be taken down immediately.
Re: Show HN: HNText – Top stories daily cleaned for readability
#4Three criticisms, in descending order of importance:
1) The length of these excerpts goes a bit beyond what is typically considered fair use. You're pretty much reprinting the entire articles. So you may run into copyright infringement claims.
2) It looks like you're scraping the content, and your scraper isn't up to the task. One of the excerpts reads: "Your email has been sent. An error has occured and your email has not been sent. Please try again. • You can't enter more than 20 emails. • You must enter the verification code below to send. • Invalid entry: Please type the verification code again."
3) Borrowing the multicolumn text layout predominant in print is great when the columns all fit on the screen, but I found myself having to constantly scroll up-down-up-down-up-down to read these.
So, in sum, you're only presenting the top stories successfully some of the time; when you are successful, you're infringing on copyrights; and the layout is not actually cleaned for readability.
Re: Show HN: HNText – Top stories daily cleaned for readability
#5Speaking of readability, have you heard of https://www.readability.com/ ? Works wonders on all but the most stubborn webpages.
Re: Show HN: HNText – Top stories daily cleaned for readability
#6My first thought was how these articles were in no way more readable than the originals.
Does anyone prefer a multi-column layout?
Re: Show HN: HNText – Top stories daily cleaned for readability
#7Speaking of readability, have you heard of https://www.readability.com/ ? Works wonders on all but the most stubborn webpages.
http://www.diffbot.com/ offers this service as an API
Re: Show HN: HNText – Top stories daily cleaned for readability
#8This is absolutely horrible and shows complete lack of respect for copyright. It should be taken down immediately.
This isn't qualitatively different than readability or numerous other extensions. The only difference is he is doing it server side.
Re: Show HN: HNText – Top stories daily cleaned for readability
#9http://getpocket.com do this "cleanse for readability" to the saved links but I think they got closer to readable than you did.
If you get to avoid copyright infringement, and get rid of this multi-column layout, I'm sure it would be better.
Re: Show HN: HNText – Top stories daily cleaned for readability
#10The generated podcast is also presumably a violation of copyright (i.e. it creates a derivative work).