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HN is not user friendly. Better comparison is Stack Exchange which is way more rich and runs on small (relative) infra.
by manojlds 4y ago
HN is not user friendly. Better comparison is Stack Exchange which is way more rich and runs on small (relative) infra.
- SMAAART 4y agohttps://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackexchange.com/performance
- arnaudsm 4y agoI agree HN could be improved with small CSS changes, but no backend change would be required.
- lm28469 4y agoWell the good thing with CSS is that you can override it with your own stuff locally if you wish to
- D13Fd 4y agoTougher to do on mobile though
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoHow does anyone use anything aside from Materialistic?!
- frosted-flakes 4y agoTough to do when the entire layout is built with nested tables, like it's still 1999.
- laputan_machine 4y agoWhat about HN is not user friendly? I think it's a breath of fresh (stale?) air.
- muzani 4y agoI believe the internet term is dank air.
- FerretFred 4y agoYeah! I really miss all those ads (not!)
- dividedbyzero 4y agoMy pet peeves: No dark mode, sorely lacking for me for reading in the dark, then there is no indication at all that you've got replies (at least a tiny number next to threads perhaps?) and the up/downvote buttons are too small to reliably tap on mobile. Oh, and enumeration support would be fantastic, the workarounds tend to be hard to read. Other than that, I think it's delightfully ugly and lightweight.
- PickledHotdog 4y agoYou may not be down for an app/mobile experience, but Harmonic is beautiful and has a dark mode
- dividedbyzero 4y agoI can't seem to find Harmonic in the iOS App Store, is it Android-only? Also, HN apps tend to make it harder to send interesting things to Roam or the laptop or Safari's reading list, the website makes that really convenient.
- russelg 4y agoThanks for the recommendation, just switched to it!
- kazinator 4y agoI use the Dark Reader extension for Firefox; HN looks fine under that. Having to separately configure individual sites or web apps for dark mode is a nonstarter anyway; if you could do that, would you really want to? Ideally, you should be able to set your device to dark mode, and everything would follow: every app, every site in the browser. Some combination of setting your OS to dark mode and using a dark mode extension in the browser sort of approximates that, imperfectly.
- kasey_junk 4y agoHN is perhaps the most user friendly site I go to with regularity. The idea that a website needs to be “rich” to be usable is one of the dumbest things the industry has convinced itself of in the last 20 years (following only ‘yaml is a smart way to encode infrastructure’).
- smitty1e 4y agoCompulsive over-engineering is by no means an IT-centric problem. It takes substantial wisdom to arrive at an 80% solution and cease fannying about.
- xyproto 4y agoAnd the people that brings this wisdom also brings few or no metrics that are appreciated by management.
- fisf 4y agoThe people who push the other direction also bring few or no metrics. I.e. there is often no reason to add <bag of features>, except a customer (who didn't buy the product yet) mentioned them as nice to have during initial sales talks.
- laputan_machine 4y agoI prefer YAML to JSON for our infra. I know some people do not like the whitespace. What do you prefer?
- withinboredom 4y agoDeclarative code. CSS is better than YAML for describing a desired state.
- ElectricalUnion 4y agoJSON: * doesn't encode Norway to false; * most formatters for JSON are deterministic. * doesn't deserialize into arbitrary objects; YAML, in in constrast... * YAML is insecure by default and will deserialize into arbitrary objects; * YAML knows that there's no such thing as wall clock time, there's only number of seconds since midnight; * YAML has 22 ways of writing true or false, and the parser will silently replace your "strings" with false. * There are 63 ways of writing multi-line strings; * A truncated YAML file is still a "valid" YAML file. https://noyaml.com/ https://noyaml.com/
- spinningslate 4y ago>Stack Exchange which is way more rich and runs on small (relative) infra. Yes, I've heard that SO runs on relatively simple and modest infra. And agree that would be a good example. >HN is not user friendly How so? I find the HN UX a refreshingly simple and effective experience. It might not have all the bells and whistles of newer discussions fora, but it doesn't obviously need them. I'd say it's a good example of form/function well suited to need. Not perfect perhaps, but very effective. YMMV of course.
- stefanvdw1 4y agoI wouldn’t say it’s not user friendly but I understand where you are coming from. I also missed some more modern features/looks and decided to build my own open source client [0]. Feel free to give it a go to see if it’s more your taste! 0. https://modernorange.io https://modernorange.io
- azangru 4y agoI love Hacker News. It is very friendly to my phone.
- twistedpair 4y agoThere was a YT preso from several years back where the StackExchange founder explained how it ran off just ~10 servers, and could run on half that many if needed. He stressed the simplicity of their arch, and that their problem space was massively cachable, so the servers just had a few hundred GB of ram, and only had to do work to rerender pages, but could store them in cache most of the time. It was a C#.Net app. So, I think there is a lot more in common than you think between HN and SO.
- withinboredom 4y agoTry loading it on a 2G (2 bars = 128kbits per second — those are bits not bytes) connection. It loads almost instantly with no fuss. Now try loading virtually any site on the same, if it ever loads at all without timing out, you’ll be waiting over 10 minutes.
- Ologn 4y agoBy rich do you mean popping up a captcha every time I search for something?