15 ms·
Text-only CNN
- unreal6 9y agoIt's amazing what happens to rendering times when only the actual content is being loaded.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ascom 9y agoEDIT: As I wrote this, someone deployed a server-side rendered version of the site. Now the site is perfect. :) This site appears to load ~350 KB of JavaScript, which I think is a bit excessive for a "lite" text-only site. From the sourcemaps, I found a long list of libraries, including: * react * redux * redux-thunk * react-router * axios * base64-js (why not window.atob/btoa?) * core-js * fbjs * react-hot-loader (should not be in a production build) * ...a bunch of other smaller modules There's only about 10 KB of non-library application code. Note that I ignore gzip when evaluating this sort of stuff, since that many bytes of code still need to be parsed, no matter how much it compresses. For the person who made this site, I would replace React with Preact (or Inferno), which should remove most of the bloat. Server side rendering would also be nice for those who don't have JavaScript enabled and would also improve the loading time. At least it's still better than cnn.com. http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170910_C8_e78305788a19b0fb12e2413251baf9b2/ http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170910_C8_e78305788a19b0fb...
- crabasa 9y ago>> At least it's still better than cnn.com. That's literally the entire value prop of the website. The author isn't obligated to use your personal list of approved web tools.
- a012 9y agoThis reveals why I didn't see anything on my phone on first time visiting it. My browser just show a blank page, then seconds later the contents show up.
- jimktrains2 9y agoWhat's worse all the content is sent inline, just not as html :( Why complicate this so much?
- earenndil 9y agoFWIW the site still looks fine with noscript enabled.
- jordache 9y agoWTF? why any JS at all for something that's pure content?
- na85 9y agoHistory repeats itself. This is just like flash sites back in the 90s.
- TomMarius 9y agoIt has no benefit on the client itself, but in this (server-rendered) case, you can think of it as improved PHP/Ruby/....
- josteink 9y agoThe question wasn't why anyone was using Javascript on the server. The question was why a pure-text non-interactive website needs any javascript at all.
- TomMarius 9y agoBecause when you're treating React as a templating language, it's easier to let it run on the client side during development and add server rendering later.
- jimktrains2 9y agoSeems like it'd be easier to just use the templates already there for the content on the server, instead of building an additional application.
- jordache 9y agoi don't know react. Can you elaborate what you mean using React as a templating language? Are you saying react can be used sans any business logic and purely for template interpolation?
- 9y ago
- gfyrt 9y agoTrump literally effected CNN to consider human tolerancy to their questinable content!
- heipei 9y agoAlmost anything is better than CNN: https://urlscan.io/result/6834c63f-b092-4e4e-b72b-91bd1c1b82c4 https://urlscan.io/result/6834c63f-b092-4e4e-b72b-91bd1c1b82... This is on par with other shitty news-websites. This website contacted 65 IPs in 7 countries across 35 domains to perform 314 HTTP transactions. [...] In total, 4 MB of data was transfered, which is 12 MB uncompressed. It took 2.753 seconds to load this page. Compare this to the now-SSR cnn.io: https://urlscan.io/result/7d13efac-ffaa-4ac2-a091-8611e39b20b2 https://urlscan.io/result/7d13efac-ffaa-4ac2-a091-8611e39b20... (59kB transfer) Edit: Someone scanned the lite-version before they switched to SSR: https://urlscan.io/result/2a9690eb-3992-4712-a657-c3be959d51f9 https://urlscan.io/result/2a9690eb-3992-4712-a657-c3be959d51...
- V99 9y agoFWIW, base64-js and similar libraries are still needed (though probably not in this case...) because window.btoa() only works on latin1 ASCII strings. Try giving it some arbitrary UTF-8: btoa("\ud83d\ude0b") -> Uncaught DOMException: Failed to execute 'btoa' on 'Window': The string to be encoded contains characters outside of the Latin1 range. (Edit: apparently HN doesn't either; changed to \u...)
- josteink 9y ago> FWIW, base64-js and similar libraries are still needed For what? This is a non-interactive text-only website. It shouldn't need anything beside HTML and CSS.
- eadmund 9y agoYou are 100% correct. Honestly, it doesn't need CSS even, although that's nice to have. I've got NoScript on, and now the pages load perfectly. I think I may return to being a CNN reader now. If only they could figure out how to monetise this.
- V99 9y agoFor the rest of the sentence... I was clearly referring to the question of why someone would use a library for base64 versus the built-in function. Not getting involved in the anti-js internet pitchfork mob.
- a9entroy 9y agoWow. After all these years of taking steps backwards, finally 100 steps forward.
- vortico 9y agoIs there a collaborative community effort for "fixing" websites to make this "100 steps forward"? The relative ease and the large benefit of doing so make it surprising I haven't seen a list of lite websites maintained by volunteers.
- jagger27 9y agoFirefox's reader mode?
- CaptSpify 9y agoIs that a "community" effort? or a Mozilla effort?
- 482794793792894 9y agoMozilla is a community effort.
- CaptSpify 9y agoFair enough. I guess I my question is: FF is a funded community effort. Is there a non-funded community effort?
- newscracker 9y agoIn my understanding, Firefox Reader Mode (and similar features in other browsers) reads in the entire page and, based on analyzing the page for cues, then decides to offer the user an option to choose reader view (or not). So while it helps improve readability, it doesn't cut down the time to load, the amount of data downloaded, and probably helps improve the battery life only marginally (this is debatable, depending on the amount of active JS, auto-play videos and also at what time offset t the user chooses reader mode after the page loads).
- cmac2992 9y agoI'm getting a totally blank page on Android 7.0 chrome 61.
- rjbwork 9y agoBookmarked. Please drop the excessive JS and image tho cnn.
- DalekBaldwin 9y agoMy laptop can run computationally-intensive physics simulations and play streaming hi-def video with no problem, but if I click a link to a mainstream news article it just about keels over and dies. How did our grandparents ever manage to load the news on an underpowered machine called "paper"?
- mixmastamyk 9y agoTry noscript, ghostery, or the other one that escapes me at the moment. News sites in general have about twenty JavaScript ad trackers on them each.
- pls2halp 9y agoThere's also Ublock Origin(general ad block, with highly granular options), and Privacy Badger.
- hossbeast 9y agoNot to mention the Brave browser
- mixmastamyk 9y agoThat's the one I was thinking of.
- foobarian 9y agoIt works like a gas; the performance-sapping computations on the articles expand until they fill up all available human latency tolerance.
- zaszrespawned 9y agoHaha this tickles me. If you arent already using reddit you should be.
- B-Con 9y agoThat and the abomination of the technology stack that we use for said process. HTML/CSS/JS is absolutely not the answer for "I want to make a UI", never mind the fact that many UI designers have no clue how the stack works and abuse it horribly. The idea may be "paper", but what's actually being done is far from it. The browser may paint and repaint a pixel a dozen times before it's ever rendered. DOM-traversal is one of the most important parts of a browser's optimization because of the tens of thousands of times it can happen to paint a screen.
- a012 9y agoDoes this belong to CNN? It's great to read news without clutter, just clear contents. I hope there are many sites like this, it saves you from load the whole page then click the reader mode or similar.
- pvg 9y agoSeems to be using the same CDN with the same hostnames as regular CNN, has their logos, their content, looks theirs.
- 0x0 9y agoThen why is it not on a subdomain of cnn.com? Anyone could copy their logo and their content.
- pvg 9y agoBecause it's a separate site? I have no idea. It takes 30 seconds to convince yourself it's theirs, though, so I'm not sure what you're asking me.
- 0x0 9y agoHow did you manage to convince yourself it's theirs? Why couldn't they just put it on lite.cnn.com? If you try to look up the whois for cnn.io, you only get: Registrar: CSC Corporate Domains, Inc. Registrar IANA ID: 299 Registrar Abuse Contact Email: Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: Name Server: NS-24.AWSDNS-03.COM Name Server: NS-630.AWSDNS-14.NET Name Server: NS-1845.AWSDNS-38.CO.UK Name Server: NS-1268.AWSDNS-30.ORG There is nothing here that indicates this is legit CNN?
- jimktrains2 9y agoI'm not sure why you just put the registry line? Also this is the same registrar cnn.com uses. Also, this registrar doesn't seem to provide _any_ whois contact information, is that allowed by ICAN?
- tptacek 9y agoThis is better than CNN.com, but the big problem with CNN is that it simply isn't very good. If you're haven't tried it again, let me again strongly recommend a subscription to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times. You might be as surprised as I was, once I was free to click around the sites without thinking about paywalls, how much better the reporting is at real newspapers than it is at free news sites.
- pls2halp 9y agoI'm going to point out that The Guardian hasn't put up a paywall, but remains a 'real newspaper'. There's also going directly to the AP(https://apnews.com/ https://apnews.com/) for straight news articles, sans editorial, if that what you want.
- erikbye 9y agoWashington Post shows ads even to subscribers.
- erikbye 9y agoBeware, you cannot cancel your subscription to Wall Street Journal without calling them.
- loudandskittish 9y agoThis is great. I'm sick to death of clicking to links on news articles and having some auto-playing video read it to me...
- CaptSpify 9y agoAny rss feed for this? This is awesome. It's quick, to the point, efficient, and allows me to get what I need, then it gets the fuck out of my way. I'm even willing to put money into this. Is that possible?
- Osiris 9y agoThe absolute worst thing about cnn.com is the auto-playing videos. I've been in quiet places and clicked a CNN news link only to have a video start blasting on the speakers. It's not only annoying but a huge waste of mobile bandwidth. Now I just need an extension that rewrites all CNN urls to this site.
- skookumchuck 9y agoMy computer's speakers are not plugged in. Problem solved.
- rmetzler 9y agoSome people use laptops.
- skookumchuck 9y agoThe speakers can often be disabled by plugging a wire that goes nowhere into the line out jack.
- hollander 9y agoPress the volume down button multiple times. Most laptops have one button that just mutes sound in one go.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- booleandilemma 9y agoThis is awesome. Major props to CNN. Reminds me of an article that appeared on HN not too long ago about Conde Nast needing Google AMP because their site is so bloated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136525
- visarga 9y agoFrom the title I thought it would be a Convolutional Neural Network for text, not the Cable News Network in plain text. An example to show that text CNN's are a thing: https://github.com/dennybritz/cnn-text-classification-tf https://github.com/dennybritz/cnn-text-classification-tf
- mindcrime 9y agoDon't feel bad, I also assumed this had something to do with Convnets before actually clicking through.
- molticrystal 9y agoI feel your pain, I thought it was either a Convolution or a Cellular neural network, was very disappointed. But thanks for pointing to some actual good material to read and look over. To add to your trend, here is an article [1] about "Texture Classification and Segmentation by Cellular Neural Networks Using Genetic Learning" , texture not text though as they are more vision related, though it would be interesting to see by what methods they could be applied to text. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tamas_Sziranyi/publication/222465158_Texture_Classification_and_Segmentation_by_Cellular_Neural_Networks_Using_Genetic_Learning/links/02e7e524ebe4f5d523000000.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tamas_Sziranyi/publicat...
- a_bonobo 9y agoThe Keras blog also has a good post on using CNNs to label text from newsgroups with their respective newsgroups: https://blog.keras.io/using-pre-trained-word-embeddings-in-a-keras-model.html https://blog.keras.io/using-pre-trained-word-embeddings-in-a... It achieves 95% accuracy without many tricks, but the newsgroups themselves are quite different so it's not the hardest problem.
- rocky1138 9y agoI get "Not found" as the only content served.
- Mikeb85 9y agoYaaay, text-only propaganda. Seriously, CNN is crap, this only helps the web scrapers.
- rwbt 9y agoAlso, NPR has had a text only site for ages http://thin.npr.org http://thin.npr.org
- fletchowns 9y agoIt's so fast, feels like it's hosted locally
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- throw89825 9y agoif you click Topics -> News[0] it takes 2.7 seconds. They should throw that subdomain behind https://memcached.org/ https://memcached.org/ (and not use php lol). Unrelated, seems like I can't listen to podcasts. There's an <audio> tag (which doesn't use data unless you click on play if you set preload="none" [1]), so that's an interesting choice. $ curl http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001 [...] Total wall clock time: 2.7s $ ping thin.npr.org [...] round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 76.407/78.359/86.985/2.442 ms [0] http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001 http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001 [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/audio https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/au...
- Jgrubb 9y agoYou don't put things behind Memcached. You put Memcached behind things.
- 1123581321 9y agoVarnish is an in-memory cache that sits in front of a site.
- Jgrubb 9y agoCorrect.
- rajandatta 9y agoAn important feature is that the article pages don't have an article title. Annoying if you like to open a set of pages from the main page to read as an initial action prior to reading. Current pages at lite.cnn.io don't seem to have extra JavaScript.
- LeoPanthera 9y agoThe BBC News site used to have a wonderful text-only version which disappeared a long time ago. I still miss it. It even worked really well in lynx.
- jayflux 9y agoBbc news should still work well in lynx, or at least it did last time I checked.
- roter 9y agoAs did the CBC; it is still available but with zero content [0]. It now directs you to a bloated mobile site. They do have RSS however [1]. [0] http://www.cbc.ca/m/text/ http://www.cbc.ca/m/text/ [1] http://www.cbc.ca/rss/ http://www.cbc.ca/rss/
- midnitewarrior 9y ago...and the World Wide Web goes full circle and mimics the service it replaced. #gopher2017
- sogen 9y agoa 16GB RAM machine to run something that ran on 16MB
- JetSpiegel 9y agoSo that you can open 1024 pages before swapping to disk. People asked for hundreds of open tabs, they got it.
- sogen 9y agoEven on a 16MB machine I had open tens of tabs without much problem, browser responsiveness on Firebird(?) was the same as this multi-core machine
- necessity 9y agoText-only fake news, hooray!
- sctb 9y agoWe've asked you many times to post civilly and substantively here, and since it that change doesn't seem forthcoming we've banned this account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post within the guidelines in the future.
- discordance 9y agoThis + reader mode in Safari is heaven. If any other news org is tuning in, please do this!
- SubiculumCode 9y agoWhen Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked about it. The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then: The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs. HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense, and does what it needs to do.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoI'd add that Google News used to have that clean feel too, many years ago. Each generation it gets worse. The latest generation using AMP is nearly unreadable on my Nexus 5 phone, it bogs it to a crawl.
- andrepd 9y agoAnd for no benefit it all (or even regression), that's what maddens me.
- CaptSpify 9y agoI couldn't find a better image but I remember this used to be the big argument why people liked Google's design over yahoo: http://aautar.digital-radiation.com/blog/uploaded_images/google_vs_yahoo.jpg http://aautar.digital-radiation.com/blog/uploaded_images/goo...
- yeukhon 9y agoWell, Yahoo was designed to be a web directory, which eventually evolved into portal (until mid of 2000, Yahoo search would still show "directory"). Google was all about search at the beginning. I still went to Yahoo and MSN for news and information. But I think some time after mid 2000, a lot of folks began to shift from going to portal to get information, to typing keywords "news" in Google search. Somehow we are hooked to typing keywords. When Google finally released news.google.com now users could have a quick navigation of current events. This behavior is manifested in the era of social media. So many people are now getting news from logging onto facebook / twitter. To verify, as a smart reader I would search on Google, hoping to find a full version from reputable news sites. In some countries/culture, portal is still preferred. e.g. Yahoo Japan being one. There are still some values of Yahoo.com; I still go there if I am looking up finance news or some pop-culture entertainment news (no other new sites do better than Yahoo on entertainment news broadcast).
- eggs_and_avo 9y agoGreat. Now we could structure the text with a markup language and syndicate it. Anyone could consume these syndicated feeds using a variety of free apps. We could even standardize this and call it... RSS :)
- banned1 9y agoIf only CNN would go back to being the old but trusted, amazing CNN, with Christiane Amanpour at the landing in Mogadishu during Restore Hope, or Bernie Shaw at the hotel in Baghdad for Desert Storm. Now, a shell of its old self, CNN is just MSNBC's cousin, with people who say "we, ahem, I mean, the Democrats, are losing Michigan" live on screen. Oh well. It's been years since I relied on CNN. But on the technical front, good for them.
- DesiLurker 9y agoits been ages I have watched any news from a narrated source. My advice (more so after last election) pay money for news. free is way worse!
- dclowd9901 9y agoI think they appeal to the majority sentiment which sways dem or rep depending on who's in office. They were much more center-right while Obama was at the helm.
- fit2rule 9y agoAh, the good ol' days, when CNN didn't have CIA minders moderating its releases and directing its reporting policies, because of, y'know .. "the war on the TERROR" .. before The Patriot Act came and ruined America. Yeah, I remember those days too. While I'm glad that CNN has become more accessible with this text interface, I'm still not going to read it. It is, without a doubt, highly unreliable a news source, and not something one should be using to base ones world view on ..
- rajeshmr 9y agoThis is awesome! Maybe its time to get the fluff out and get back to basics :)
- javasecurity 9y agoThis is awesome. I really don't understand why a new page would load so many stuff and then it hangs at some place. Sometimes I was wondering whether it was loading the whole world. Maybe we should take some steps back now to keep our site SIMPLE but COMPLETE. Just like Hacker News itself or Lobsters(https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs) or Pxlet(http://www.pxlet.com/ http://www.pxlet.com/) so that we would not be distracted too much. Maybe technically Google's AMP is a good help on boosting the loading speed but it only works on mobile devices and it takes much effort to make the site adaptable to AMP. Usually a modern website would load lots of third party libraries, ads from different advertising platforms, social media sharing modules and analytic modules etc. All these would make lots of HTTP requests and increase the response time. How would they not be SLOW?
- _ix 9y agoGlad to see they have the Spanish version alongside English. Now, how about some other languages... Arabic please!
- piinbinary 9y agoI love it. The only improvement I could ask for is about 100 bytes of CSS to limit the column width, change it to a serifed font, and increase the font size.
- nyolfen 9y agoi'd love to make a little userscript to redirect articles from cnn.com to here, but i don't think there's any way to extract the .com url from the .io pages. also -- compare to cnn.com from 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20000817204102/http://www2.cnn.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000817204102/http://www2.cnn.c...
- stewbrew 9y agoI honestly applaud the endeavor. Too bad though they only include the main headlines. I personally very much like the approach of my preferred newspaper that offers full, mobile, text only editions of its web site.
- erickhill 9y agoI'm totally going to hit this with my Amiga. This is great!
- bobsil1 9y agoBig spender. Using my Vic-20
- ramphastidae 9y agoIf only this kind of view was available for all sites, but via a simpler, more syndicated format.
- lousken 9y agoUnless it's real web app like gdocs, this is how sites should be - no need for js, works perfectly on my 64kbps.
- gnarbarian 9y agoNow if only I could get this from a decent news organization.
- scholia 9y agoCNN is a decent news organization. It may not be the best, but it's a very long way from being the worst....
- aaronbrethorst 9y agoThey're still loading an analytics javascript file that is 230KB minified. That's literally two orders of magnitude larger than anything else that gets loaded from that URL.
- pearjuice 9y agoYou don't know how to block these?
- aaronbrethorst 9y agoOf course I do. That’s not the point.
- vijaybritto 9y agoOkay, now the server side page is being rendered. The content weighs 6.7kb HTML + 877B CSS + frikkin 52.7kb analytics!! Very fast, but still analytics on this lite site is bothering to see!
- BucketSort 9y agoLet down. I thought this was a convolutional neural network applied to text analytics.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Buge 9y agoThere seem to be no ads. How do they plan to make money with this?
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoGive it time. The original CNN site, many years ago, wasn't as slow and terrible as it is today. I'm not convinced history won't repeat itself if this version became popular.
- chii 9y agogiven that the ads are likely to be blocked by the target audience of that site, either donations, or subscriptions seems to be a good answer.
- yakult 9y agoThey're probably going for native advertising.
- eadmund 9y agoHonestly, with a few tweaks (RSS support, titles on pages, getting rid of the 'Breaking News, Latest News and Videos' in every title) I'd pay $12/year for something like this. I'm pretty sure that CNN gets less than that from a statistical viewer of its pages. Wouldn't it be awesome if pure text, static pages became the new normal, and we looked at video-and-image, JavaScript-laden SPAs in much the same way that we look at parachute pants, bowl haircuts and rhinestone-studded jean jackets?
- pmlnr 9y agoHow about no google analytics and making it truly text only? :)
- zaszrespawned 9y agoWhy not just use RSS? This is time and effort wasted. Given RSS is old, text only and has XML its very lightweight, has good support and fast readers. No heavy javascript needed as readers of RSS are often native apps or browser plugins
- shakna 9y ago> as readers of RSS are often native apps or browser plugins That's probably why. Most people can barely drive their web browser, and many tech people are reluctant to install new extensions, because of trust issues. A web page, in a nice pure form like this, is fast, responsive, and easy to use.
- scholia 9y agoYou can get news feeds as a web page in various places such as Dave Winer's River of News http://radio3.io/rivers/ http://radio3.io/rivers/ Light, ad-free and totally trustworthy ;-)
- SimeVidas 9y agoI wish feedly.com (my RSS reader) had a light interface. It feels so bloated and slow.
- kbrtalan 9y agoImma crawl the shit out of this
- gamedna 9y agoThere is a signifiant value prop for this type of clean interface when considering users that use accessibility tools to browse the web. I had the pleasure of working with an engineer whose vision was impaired. Truly inspired with all the self-engineered tools and software that he created to sanitize sites of all the bloat for his consumption with a screen reader. This type of site will make his life a little easier.
- sverhagen 9y agoI the only one whose mind crossed the idea that maybe this is just a temporary service during the natural disasters in the south of the US?
- eadmund 9y agoMaybe they'll quietly keep it up forever. A man can dream …
- codecamper 9y agoawesome. i was getting very tired of a video every time i looked at an article.
- kristianc 9y agoIf someone could write a wrapper to do this with any major news website, they'd have a hugely popular and profitable product.
- mrmekon 9y agoI can't believe wayback machine has this. I ran a text-only scraper for ~200 websites back in the early 2000s. https://web.archive.org/web/20060803053549/http://inr.cjb.net:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060803053549/http://inr.cjb.ne... Most were RSS feeds, since those used to exist. The rest were hand-written parsers, which were highly temperamental.
- deanclatworthy 9y agoThe problem with that is you could aggregate the links, but you can't host the content which kinda defeats the point in the first place.
- lwhi 9y agoBrilliant. This achieves some key user-centred aims; content is easily navigated, and given prominence above any other feature. I wonder if the addition of aria-roles might add some useful context for screen readers? In an age when personal assistants are gaining populating, maybe sparse text-centred interfaces are set to gain more popularity?
- eljee 9y agoText-only independent news: http://levelnews.org http://levelnews.org
- hk__2 9y agoWhat’s your affiliation with this site? All your submissions and comments on HN are about it.
- eljee 9y agoI built the site because independent news is being increasingly censored/filtered out by monopoly platforms.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hk__2 9y agoThanks; you should mention that in your comments. There’s some irony in the fact you hide your affiliation when promoting a website about independent news.
- tu7001 9y agoIs that, that famous fake news factory?:-D
- zeep 9y agoIt is, but it is still a good example.
- agumonkey 9y agoI clicked without thinking. The landing list is a bit too bare, but I love it anyway. Thank god for text (even unicode text)
- qbaqbaqba 9y agoI really miss RSS.
- jim-jim-jim 9y agoI still don't understand why it fell out of favor.
- thousande 9y agonot enough advertising?
- zeep 9y agoRSS is still available on a lot of websites ... and for the ones that aren't available using RSS, you can use a third party service that will create a feed.
- confounded 9y agoIt's still the best! I started using it again about a year ago and it's been fantastic.
- jim-jim-jim 9y agoSweet. I'd prefer it if every site looked like this.
- amiga-workbench 9y agoIt would be nice if there was a TLD for text-only, javascript free websites.
- corgihamlet 9y ago.txt
- lzy 9y ago.mobi Well, at least they tried.
- mmcnl 9y agoI love this. Pure information without bloat. One of the reaons I love "Teletekst" "teletext"). It also looks very nice, despite the fact that is 30 years old. 101 is news. 818 is domestic football. It's actually still very popular in The Netherlands, and the app is one of the most used apps here. https://nos.nl/teletekst#101 https://nos.nl/teletekst#101
- pizzaknife 9y agoThis is truly a treat. thank you
- thunfisch 9y agoThis is what the world needs. Seriously, I hate this trend to bloat up websites with the rage of a thousand suns. There is absolutely no value, but it increases bandwith usage, load times and CPU/RAM usage. News websites having "fancy, modern" websites actually make me think less of them. Fuck this web-bloat shit. The web is broken.
- tosser350 9y agoNo value to the user, but all that bloat allows for analytics and tracking for more ad $ and the images make emotional manipulation easier to get more clicks. Not to mention that 99.9% of people don't care or don't even know what bandwidth, CPU, or RAM are.
- MicroBerto 9y ago> 99.9% of people don't care or don't even know what bandwidth ...but they sure know what data rates are. Not that a website is the root of their data problems of course
- bradleyankrom 9y agodeath to auto-playing video always and forever... CNN's site is especially bad about that, as I've experienced cases where I stop the "big" video at the top of the page and scroll down, only to have it start back up again when it moves to the sidebar.
- alansammarone 9y agoThat is SO annoying. When it happens I don't even read the article anymore, I just rage close the tab.
- mungoid 9y agoHah I do the exact same thing. Actually, out of spite I go to foxnews ;-)
- 9y ago
- akamaozu 9y agoAll this needs is a search field and it's complete.
- rsp1984 9y agoThis is cool but for some reason (maybe reading too much HN!) I clicked and expected a demo or research paper about a Convolutional Neural Net (CNN) that you can feed lots of text and it would figure out the content and semantic relationships of all the texts on its own and it would get better with every new text that you feed it. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already done that...
- ourcat 9y agoYou should see this. "Epic 2014" : https://youtu.be/Bt3TmUW90B8 https://youtu.be/Bt3TmUW90B8
- thousande 9y agoIf someone is missing a universal ui language for the web, this is it.
- schmappel 9y agoI realize this kind of defeats the purpose, but I applied just a tiny bit of CSS (and Open Sans) to make it look slightly better. Here's the userstyle in the hope it's useful to some: https://gist.github.com/appel/7a475dcbd3f469d73c756385b2c7cf06 https://gist.github.com/appel/7a475dcbd3f469d73c756385b2c7cf...
- chewzerita 9y agodoesn't work in emacs eww 0/10
- tomahunt 9y agoIs there somewhere an index of text-only pages?
- cronjobma 9y agoIf you could summarize, what are the key takeaways to create awesome, fast and minimal sites like this lite CNN?
- et2o 9y agoI was trying to figure out what was different about this convolutionao neural network for about 60 seconds.
- jackschultz 9y agoSomeone pointed out below, but in a comment way down in the thread, but CNN is actually who's behind this: https://twitter.com/CNN/status/906821174805630976 https://twitter.com/CNN/status/906821174805630976 I'm not sure if the reason behind this is because of possible weak phone connections or that the hurricane is a good way to promote the text only site, but either way, huge shoutout to CNN for going forward with this themselves. I've thought for a while about scraping news sites to just show their text, or something like classifying articles based on their subjects from different ones. On this front, they did it first.
- aiyodev 9y agoThis is what CNN looked like on 9/11: http://i.imgur.com/tqnVwp6.jpg http://i.imgur.com/tqnVwp6.jpg All the major sites switched to something like this when the internet slowed to a halt. I assume they've always had a minimal version ready in case something like it happens again.
- gravypod 9y agoI'd pay $5/month for a reputable news site to provide this all year long.
- knz 9y agohttp://www.npr.org http://www.npr.org ? It's not text only but it's considerably more minimal than most news websites, loads almost instantly, doesn't have auto play content, and is considered a reputable source. The BBC used to be similar but their international website is awful now (slow to load, more adverts, and less emphasis on actual news).
- mallaidh 9y agoIt's text-only when you use http://thin.npr.org http://thin.npr.org
- 9y ago
- blocked_again 9y agoYou know hacker news people live in a world of their own when a post regarding stripped down Cable News Network website gets more up votes than all the posts on convolutional neural networks combined https://hn.algolia.com/?query=convolut&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=convolut&sort=byPopularity&pre...
- trumpownsyou420 9y agoawesome! now i can get my fake news no matter the connection.
- mattacular 9y agoIt's great that they included an easy toggle to Spanish language. If you're trying to learn Spanish and already know English or vice-versa being able to read topical news every day and switch back and forth easily for both languages is a great tool!
- mdibaiee 9y agoI just created an awesome-lite-websites list to be filled with lightweight and usable websites alike: GitHub: https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites Hacker News thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15212155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15212155
- mungoid 9y agoI'm curious though. What's the root domain going to be if this one is lite? Being a .io I'd like to think it will be an api site or something?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ausjke 9y agoNice format, hopefully with some real unbiased content but I am not expected that at CNN though, nowadays the news has to be a mean value of (Reuters + NYT + CNN + Foxs + ....)/N, but I just do not have enough time to read them all, so I read HN instead.
- ThisNameNotUsed 9y agoThis might be counter-intuitive to types who comment here but the CNN Snapchat thread should also be appeasing to you for the same reasons this text-only site is. You go through their stories until you find the one you want and that's all you get. No ticker tape. No flashing "BREAKING NEWS" decorations and no fluff. It's the same concept only in a visual medium.
- emivvv 9y agoImagine how much better it would be with margins. Same for HN. Lobstes gets this right https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/
- GoKnight 9y agoThis format is the best for low bandwidth access.
- AJRF 9y agoThis has been top of hackernews all day. Funny how as we move further and further into the future, developing all these interfaces as we go, we still can't beat a format that has been here since the beginning.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- thecopy 9y agoI can recommend https://cor.ax https://cor.ax which is similar to this
- cdevs 9y agoLove it, now Yahoo!'s disasterous bloated website needs it but it's mostly clickbait anyway but attests load clickbait faster
- pamicel 9y agoThe article "This is what South Florida looks like now" kinda loses its purpose here
- kyleperik 9y agoI've been thinking about introducing a similar alternative to my webpage, but in order to support terminal browsers or IE
- Supermighty 9y agoIt's so fast. More websites should strip down their size to favor speed.
- jordache 9y agoThe link to the full CNN experience at the bottom of each article doesn't deep link to that article's full experience. It just goes to the cnn home page. big fail
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago"This is what South Florida looks like now" text only :P
- MilnerRoute 9y agoI like how if you click on a link, that link is also text only. The regular CNN site sometimes starts auto-playing videos without asking first.
- tostrstrudel 9y agoI messed around with aggregating a few big news sites' RSS feeds and generating a static site from them after being in areas with choked cell reception. Turns out it's still plodding along! http://104.236.56.7 http://104.236.56.7
- marmshallow 9y agoFacebook too has a mostly-text lightweight version: https://mbasic.facebook.com/ https://mbasic.facebook.com/
- johnlorry 9y agoI quickly created a basic userstyle to use a better font and a paper-like which is easier on the eyes. * { font-family: 'Open Sans', Helvetica; color: #222; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.4; } body{ background: #dac3a8; } main{ max-width: 920px; margin: 0 auto; }
- manbearpigg 9y agoI love simple interfaces. The only problem is that CNN is fake news.
- sctb 9y agoYou've been using this site for primarily political and ideological purposes, which is against the site guidelines. Please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cafard 9y agoNice, but it would be good to know who wrote what. Not for standard wire-service stuff about floods etc., but anything with an element of opinion.
- coupdetaco 9y agoHistorical text here http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS
- commenter1 9y agoThe analytics company I used to work had a private news archive for pretty much every news paper/magazine you could imagine. All text, all searchable. I've long wondered how come no one makes a site like that for everybody.
- bradezone 9y agoI made this thingie based on Google News and the design of Newsmap: http://news.bradezone.com/ http://news.bradezone.com/ It's one of my few side projects I use every day.