I'm pretty sure the developer is not a native speaker. The email in the contact link looks like a Chinese name and I've seen this site shared in Chinese technology forums before.
Not to disparage your coder skills, but I think this is a good example of why the "brutalist" style of HN is superior. In exchange for a 5MB deluge of scripts that takes 20 seconds to fully load (actually it just jumped up another 3MB while I was typing this) and a 20s finish time I get maybe ~3 HN entires on screen at a time, versus the main site where I get 20+ entries on 50kb of resources
Also drop the google analytics & addthis trackers man. If the main site doesn't need it then your <1000 hits per month scraper don't need them either.
I actually appreciate how they approached their aggregation. It's pleasant to the eyes, is readable, and adds some visual interest to the feed. Little excerpts and thumbnails better help me decide whether or not I want to click on a link.
I don't think information density (in actual space) is as valuable to me as it is to you, though.
Agreed! I like the UI. The snippets aroused my interest in the actual content linked a lot more than a bland (and often misleading) title.
These days I often scroll past pages of hacker news without clicking on anything. I used to check out the comments often. But now no longer. The snippets seem revitalize the site for me a bit.
I didn't mind it. I don't know if i'll use it regularly, but it loaded quickly over mobile data for me. Lots of times stories I click on from here will take a while to load. It was nice to get a preview of the articles that loaded relatively quickly without having to open a new tab and wait.
16 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 48.0 ms ] threadEdit: I ironically chose a link with 0 comments. So let me amend that: You should indicate when a link has no comments. :)
Also drop the google analytics & addthis trackers man. If the main site doesn't need it then your <1000 hits per month scraper don't need them either.
I don't think information density (in actual space) is as valuable to me as it is to you, though.
These days I often scroll past pages of hacker news without clicking on anything. I used to check out the comments often. But now no longer. The snippets seem revitalize the site for me a bit.
Huh? It loaded instantly for me in FF Win64 over residential cable modem on a 5 yr old mid-range PC.
I loaded the site on desktop, I liked the visual arrangement a lot -- it's a clean/fresh aesthetic.
Shame self-promotion of my Hackerbot app for iOS.
my new "on the bus" default i think...