301–310 of 568 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re right about the problem: web pages tend to scale with the size of the organization serving them, not the size of the content. But this is the failure, not a defense. It’s a big problem on mobile and the reason I read HN comments before the article. > NYT employs 1,300 people
Definitely a good point. You'd imagine they'd have at least 1 person who optimizes the site for page size / load speed.
Another point for the bullshit web: The GDPR cookie consent notification. I really hate clicking on those notifications to make them go away. Designers, can you please just add a non-obtrusive link, instead of a pop up that covers half my browser screen?
"This site uses cookies." is the new "Hot singles in your area!"
I think I heard this on Hacker News, but I don't recall who from. Whenever I see a popup begging me to sign up for a spam list, I put in postmaster@that-domain.com now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Well how is the format of plaintext the best method of getting information to the end user? What if you added a thin indexing layer on top of the plaintext? That would allow people to jump through huge documents with ease, but it's no longer plaintext. Sounds more valuable to me. Where is the line? What's the ideal? 2. Fair enough 3. Referencing "increasing the entropy in the universe" isn't a good argument becaus…
As far as #1 goes, I'm arguing that plaintext is the ideal to strive towards, not the living practical reality. As far as indexing and access, the Gopher protocol and Teletext are great options to look at. As previously noted, if you don't find that waste is fundamentally wrong on a moral level, there's no point forward from here. I view myself on a planet of dwindling resources, vanishing biodiversity, and warming a…
I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much of the data downloaded is actually for typography? Also, browsers have good enough typography by default, which can be controlled with CSS.
Everyone's favorite example of that kind of "brutalist" design: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't agree more with the points you make, I've spent a decent amount of time and effort reducing the overhead of my blog, for example - https://goose.us/thoughts/on-the-purpose-of-life/ That page includes images and "embedded" youtube videos, but loads 454kb of 3,187 words with 10 requests in 450-600ms - if anyone has any suggestions on how to reduce that further, I'd love to hear. Going to bookmark that txti.es s…
I'd start with the 100+KB PNG images. None of those pictures are complex, they can be compressed much more.
I agree on those complexity graphs since they're actually scanned from Sean Carroll's book and edited in Pixelmator - if I was better with graphics I could probably recreate them as SVG or in an editor and make it only a couple kb.
Same for the MinutePhysics screen grab, though I couldn't bring myself to attempt a poor recreation of their work and couldn't get rid of the weird pink gradient background which probably prevents better compression.
The Youtube cover images are still being pulled in from youtube - I debated downloading/compressing/hosting them myself, but figured I'd gain more from downloading them from the separate domain since I still think there is a default limit of connections the browser will open to a single domain at the same time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how many people here read usenet or were on old mailing lists. You could have removed a some hard edges in usability and everything would have been connected to phones with monochrome text displays back in the nineties already. They didn't even provide decent email experience. But instead we got the technology developing through some ringtone stuff advertised on TV. I guess it's something that you can in…
That's one of the wildest things! We had the technological capacity to run Unix systems with several hundred users simultaneously and access at the speed of thought with 26kbps modems back in 1992, complete with instant messaging and personal directories! What happened?!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough). Nonsense. I subscribe to the NYT so that I can read the news. Nothing about that necessitates tracking which users read which articles. If the NYT uses page view data for anything other than statistics for their advertisin…
So, how does the NYT style section fit into your idea of 'actual journalism'?
If the NYT cut their paper down to just the style section, horoscopes, and other garbage, they would be just another Buzzfeed and are probably not equipped to compete.
On the other hand, Info Wars, Mother Jones and friends offer publications with basically no journalism at all. That's the space the NYT, WSJ, Miami Herland, Chicago Tribune, and so on fill. They do Pulitzer prize worthy reporting. If these papers become run-of-the-mill click farms, I'm sure silicon valley will run them out of business, as rage bait is not really their core competency.
I think I heard this on Hacker News, but I don't recall who from. Whenever I see a popup begging me to sign up for a spam list, I put in postmaster@that-domain.com now.
What's the postmaster supposed to be? Is it set in practice?
https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/
How much that works out in practice is inconsistent. Most sysadmins will set it up in my experience, but it's not out of the question that it wouldn't exist. Some domains will just set up a catchall and it'll be directed to someone anyway. It varies.