Show HN: Hacker News Outliers (hn.moritz.pm)
I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically.
It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days.
The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
57 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread(thanks to the guys at https://hnrss.github.io/, who offer multiple customizable RSS feeds for HN)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I do have to say I think you'll miss out on a lot of what makes HN great if you only read those "main" articles
At best this is just arrogance from the website developer thinking they know best.
Well, for one HN works without Javascript, while that URL yields just a blank page.
Blocking third party scripts and cookies is one thing, but not wanting first party script just forces the developer to use server-side templating for their static content which means you either deliver everything from the same origin (bad for latency) or chain a CDN in front that picks out static content to cache (I don't think that's compatible with the web 2.0 ideology). So it's not ideal too
Yes. Not all users may be able-bodied, or humans.
Googlebot has been able to do this for well over a decade. Time to get out of 2001 era thinking.
From a web developer's perspective, it doesn't make any sense to me because JS is just one part of the web standard. If you're not going to support it, then why do you expect any websites to work?
It's like if I deleted gcc from a linux machine and then tried to build a package, and then complained that it wasn't building, because "it shouldn't use C." Well, C is an expected part of the operating system and so the package author has decided to use it. You've broken your system.
It’s also ironic that the one thing HTML was designed for, namely presenting static content, is now deemed unworkable without having to run custom client-side code.
There's nothing wrong with tampering with your browser by disabling JavaScript, but you have to understand that what you're doing is unsupported by websites. It's unreasonable to complain that the website is broken when you disabled the technologies that the web developer chose to use.
One such reason might be that it allows the developer to host their frontend statically, which usually is much simpler to set up and operate.
I would find it fair to appreciate that the author provides their service for free to the world. So while it might be true that their website isn’t fully compatible with certain client-side tools, that kind of support doesn’t come for free, and it also may not align with the goals of the author. (Which in this case apparently are educational ones, and not to maximise accessibility for a broadest-possible audience.)
Because the content here is dynamic. It changes every 30 minutes, even if it's just the scores. HTML was not designed to serve dynamic content.
> It's minimal and most code is on the server. Also it's a small footprint and proven to be fast (Preact). This site has a 100 performance score on Google Pagespeed,
Yes, it's nicely minimal in a number of aspects. Good point.
> JS doesn't mean bad UX.
For those who run their browser with scripts off by default it is.
Disabling JS and cookies by default has another nice benefit: on a number of sites, the stupid content-obcsuring cookie banner just does not exist (as well as ads, of course). And pages load time is much better.
> Blocking third party scripts and cookies is one thing, but not wanting first party script just forces the developer to use server-side templating for their static content which means you either deliver everything from the same origin (bad for latency) or chain a CDN in front that picks out static content to cache (I don't think that's compatible with the web 2.0 ideology).
That doesn't hold.
If a server can format data into a Json, it can format the same data into HTML and serve it the same. In the specific case of this site, the generated HTML has the same lifetime as the generated Json.
From the site: "It is updated every 2 hours."
Ironically, because this site is nicely minimal in a number of aspects, one can play with statistics. Not counting cloudflare beacon js, I measure
1.16k HTML, 1.56k CSS, 18.44k JS, 1.05k favicon.svg, 1.61k JSON payload.
Therefore 77% of bandwidth used is Javascript:
By serving HTML instead of Json (at the same price), the bandwidth cost would be divised by 4.4: Think about it: running custom code on each browser of each visitor to perform exactly the same computation and yield the same DOM each and every time is totally useless.All in all, serving a full HTML page instead of a HTML shell + custom JS + Json totally makes sense.
The good news is, for the past year I have started to hear seasoned web developers complain more about the sad state web development has been for years, and longing for some simplicity. Wait and see.
Kudos to the author for embracing minimalism. You can go a step further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier
Edit/Update: My bad. 100, it is. :-)
Currently at 107 points and of course still on the front page (at #24).
* Submissions for high comment number to vote ratio. This sometimes means it’s a submission with a political bent, leading to flame wars; you can easily tell this by the title. However, sometimes this ratio is high for unexpected submissions, I check these to see what the discussion is about.
* Submissions that are voted to first page with, say, >20 votes, but have either no comments or a single comment. These are usually are topics that people unanimously agree with nothing much to say. These are relatively rare, I’d say maybe once or twice a month but are interesting.
Curiously enough, there's one just like that on the frontpage now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39419195
How is this meaningful different than /best
https://news.ycombinator.com/best
https://news.ycombinator.com/best
https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=500
They are amazing. A collection of single vote items. Future 500+ ones yet to be found.
I called it Detox for Reddit and you could connect your reddit account to get your subreddits and then it would check distribution of scores for that subreddit and only send you the really good stuff in a daily digest e-mail.
The idea was that it would prevent the FOMO that made me check Reddit more often to avoid missing the good stuff among the sludge.
I wasn't planning on monetizing but monetization strategy would have been a limited number of subreddits (3-5) in a free version, all your subreddits in a small monthly subscription (like 1-2$) and then a larger fee to enable NSFW subreddits.
If reddit allowed them, I would have advertised directly on reddit in ADHD and other relevant subreddits like Productivity etc.
So I like your idea, I think it works as is but would be enhanced by having customizable thresholds or actual calculation of outliers so you can say give me the top 5% or 1% of posts.
I made a Telegram bot very similar to what you described (but free since it's just a few lines of code) https://t.me/MySubredditsBot
It's just that this method is susceptible to votecount inflation, a la Reddit from 2014 to 2024.
I use it in "Top 20" mode. It helps me keep up with the bigger stories just by checking in once a day. Loads super fast, has worked great for many years now.