81–90 of 398 posts
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.
What do you mean? Haven't had that issue. Am on desktop version, unsure if mobile exists
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> news sites It's really a sad state of affairs when an industry with such a strong historical connection with publishing is now reasonably cited as an industry worse at publishing than most others.
Newspapers have always been full of ads fwiw
I don’t understand how online ads are as big a business as they are, other than the troll stuff on Instagram. The rest is pretty unremarkable and ineffective.
I can probably count on my hands they number of times I intentionally engaged with an ad in the last 25 years.
I wish they would update the line-height to something more reasonable. ~1.5x font size would be go a long way in paragraph readability. Other than that, it's fast and stable. About all I require from a forum. Edit: All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don't want to install addons/mods/hacks to fix line-height.
I have, but it's a mark of frustration for me. It definitely falls under the heading of, "The user shouldn't have to do this."
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
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 held the mouse over something longer. No idea. But it loaded 824KB without me interacting with anything. Just because I moved the mouse.
The actual click on the like button added 30KB on top of that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern front-end toolsets are finally starting to address this by using automated critical css, SSR + "hydrating" on load for interactive elements, webpack treeshaking + chunking of assets into tiny js/css files and only loading code based on what the page/routes asks for, PurgeCSS to get rid of unused css, cssnano/uglify/htmlmin/imagemin, etc. Webpack and these various popular tools has done a lot to make the web be…
Yeah, but those fixes and workarounds are only almost enough to sometimes compensate for the code bloat that the frameworks themselves have caused.
I dont think people have really seen what server-side rendering (ala Next.js/Nuxt.js), decoupled components, modern treeshaking, minification, and chunking can do for performance. We've yet to have a full web framework designed entirely to encompass this from day one but they're coming and getting better at it.
Outside of the endless 3rd party crap the 'business' guys add, if anything, it's no longer the JS framework size and library cruft I'm worried about it's how many object watchers I've got at runtime via Vue.js and reactive style programming (which automatically adds Object.observe style watchers to all data) + component initializers (which can add overhead to simple HTML templates). Fortunately with the new Vue 3 function API there is a clear distinction between observed values vs static/immutable/config data. The amount of observers per page dropped dramatically. Otherwise looking at a Vue project in the performance tab shows it's highly async and efficient.
The new Vue functional API (allegedly) is also going to be far easier to treeshake so you really only ever get the library features you're using. Even for something like Lodash or Ramda where you might use only 10% of the functions it's a big deal.
I'm sure React is making similar progress in this direction and it was already smaller than Vue.
CSS Frameworks have some ways to go and PurgeCSS isn't perfect but using a functional CSS framework like Tailwind or Tachyons also helps in this regard, so all of the stuff isn't intertwined and can be stripped out.
This type of tooling really does massively improve the state of things automatically, even with poor coding practices or large applications spanning multiple pages. SSR, treeshaking, chunking, stripping unused CSS, etc is a 'zero cost' type optimization that I've seen turn 700-1000kb dev assets into loading 100kb base + a few 5-10kb js/CSS files dependent on the page.
While I like the light-weight design, I would prefer some bigger hit-boxes for the links on mobile. Also, the vote-buttons are very tiny. And I would prefer if "hiding" would be near the voting buttons.
I wish HN had a "search" button but it's OK to search through Google. I hope they will never change the design forever. It reminds me of the BBS which I still logs on through Cterm these days.
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…
I assume you have JavaScript disabled, right? If so, can you give an example of a similar webpage that doesn’t reload the whole page to reflect your vote?
You can't do much with the response without JS but a single upvote doesn't change anything on the page so there's no need for the reload.
I wish HN had a "search" button but it's OK to search through Google. I hope they will never change the design forever. It reminds me of the BBS which I still logs on through Cterm these days.
Down in the footer, there's an Algolia search box that works pretty well.