Show HN: Strength News – An HN-inspired website for sport and gym enthusiasts | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Strength News – An HN-inspired website for sport and gym enthusiasts

strengthnws.com

137 pointsMoistjuggernaut84 comments

Open articleView on HN

One thing I like about HN is its lightweight, unobtrusive, and respectful design.

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Hacker News:

7 requests 61.10 KB / 20.65 KB transferred Finish: 1.04 s DOMContentLoaded: 484 ms load: 876 ms

Doesn't require JS

Doesn't have a floating top bar

Doesn't load content from third-party domains

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Strength News:

13 requests 1.07 MB / 358.76 KB transferred Finish: 2.28 s DOMContentLoaded: 1 s load: 1.39 s

Requires JS

Has a floating top bar

Loads content from third-party domains, including tracking scripts

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That criticism aside, I like the concept, and would probably use it if it had active discussions, like HN.

>1MB for such a simple website is an absolute dealbreaker :(

It loads absolutely slowly

Strictly speaking, it's relatively slow, not absolutely slow. If websites all loaded in 10s and this one loaded in 1s, it'd be blazing fast.

That said, it took 1.74s to load for me, I wouldn't call that slow by any stretch of the word.

Not when I looked at it. In fact, when I looked at it, nothing was loading.

If you want active discussions, r/gainit or r/fitness isn’t too bad. As well as the weightlifting subreddits — really nice and supportive folks there.

i guess r/weightroom would be the best match. it has daily threads reserved for banter but is otherwise well moderated.

r/bodybuilding is pure meme, r/weightlifting pretty focused on the sport itself. r/fitness has a lot of questions by beginners who ask the same thing every single day. i don't know r/powerlifting, but i heard it's very memey too.

nah, imo r/weightroom is the best, but as a newcomer, please lurk for a couple of weeks until you learn the rules and culture.

There's also /r/AdvancedFitness.

Something like http://handlr.sapico.me/ ? :p My own creation. Use it as a RSS-reader, todo list and Post to HN now.

I have some variaties running of it, eg. for my current city where i live.

Like HN with tags. Very cool!

I wish it did not require an email address to sign up. On HN it is optional.

It's the default on asp.net actually and it makes sense, had a lot of spam at first.

This is great feedback to help optimize the site but I wouldn’t lose sleep over it u til you’ve proven the concept. As an early iteration I’m glad you made a useful tool and you shipped it. Optimizing bundle sizes is much easier than making something useful.

That being said, getting feedback like this helps you spot ways to make it better. I’m on an iPhone X with very good data most of the time so my opinion is going to be biased toward not caring about 1MB of js that will be cached in future visits.

I like the concept too. Unfortunately due to all those things loading it wouldn’t work in Safari on iOS. I use Firefox Focus as an ad blocker and I suspect it doesn’t like a bunch of the techniques used to load content.

Wow these comments are bordering on toxic. The dude created something useful in his sparetime Jesus Christ nobody has anything better to do than complain about JS and load times??? Site runs fine on my iPhone and desktop, lighten up !

I don't think its fair to call the comments toxic. The OP is titled "HN-inspired" so its only fair to compare it with HN, no?

I agree. Building an MVP with something like React et al makes sense because it's a pleasurable developer experience. Comments like the ones on this thread make me scared to show any side projects I have/might develop.

I think if it's on Show HN, there's an implicit assumption that one is interested in the question "what's the most critical feedback, right or wrong, I can get?"

JS and load time commenters represent a particular demographic within HN which may not necessarily represent mainstream opinion, so no need to get worked up over them. Just recognize them for what they are, mentally filter them out, and move on to other more insightful comments.

All the comments about JS are, to use Hacker News lingo, “tangential”. As someone who both lifts and enjoys the environment of Hacker News, I would very much appreciate a website outside of Reddit or the more mainstream lifting forums, full of bro-science, anecd(o/a)tal comments and misinformation, where I could discover interesting and factual articles and studies on how to improve my lifting. This would be a benefit to the whole community.

HN: Modern web development is defined by javascript frameworks, server side rendering is dead.

Also HN: Your site uses javascript? Unacceptable.

HN3: Depends on your use case.

It's almost as if Hacker News doesn't represent a single homogenous group of people that all share the same views.

I'm one of the two creators of this website. It grew out of the problem of Moistjuggernaut that he couldn't find any in dept training articles. So I helped him set up this MVP to see if we can find people with the same interest.

The site itself is built with vue.js + firebase. Commenting is definitely the next functionality we are going to add. With ssr we want to tackle the no JavaScript issue we are currently having.

A quick search about your tech yielded https://vuejs.org/v2/examples/hackernews.html (which demoes at https://vue-hn.now.sh/top) Maybe you can advance your site with some learnings from that. Keep at it, gratz on the launch!

Just a reminder that HN become popular in spite of his CMS not because of it

The best place I've seen for in-depth training articles it the Advanced Fitness subreddit,

https://old.reddit.com/r/AdvancedFitness/

It looks nice. I don't mind it requiring JS, although I certainly agree a website of this kind doesn't need it similar to how HN has only a few lines of it.

I assume this is an MVP and the commenting and other HN features will come later.

Off-topic:

I say "H. N." in my head whenever I see Hacker News as an acronym.

My question is, when you have an acronym that you tend to say the individual letters of, do you change the a/an? For example, this example would be "an aech en inspired ...", where if you read the acronym as "Hacker News", it would be "a Hacker News inspired...".

Another common example is FBI.

It always irks me when I see "a FBI agent", but I'm not sure which is actually correct.

> when you have an acronym that you tend to say the individual letters of, do you change the a/an?

It depends on the sound the acronym, or initialism, starts with. So "an FBI" because you say "EFF-BEE-EYE" vs. "a CIA agent".

The general style guide is to "write it how you say it":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Indefinite_a...

https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/A...

Of course there will be variants where you'd just have to make a decision (e.g. how do you pronounce SQL?)

One note: technically, 'HN' is an initialism; acronyms are special cases of initialisms that are pronounceable.

Any reasons you didn't go with https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters ?

Moistjuggernaut, do you subscribe to r/fitness or r/advancedfitness? Just curious what you see differentiating strengthnws from those options.

I am with r/fitness, where my overall opinion is the lack of quality and the same recurring posts and superficial questions. IMO this subreddit is good for going from beginner to intermediate. As for advancedfitness I wasn't aware this was a subreddit so thank you! I just spent some time going over it, I think our goals are similar but if I had to point something out it would be the diversity of topics, meaning I would maybe like more off topic posts. Although while typing this I'm realizing this is probably an insignificant difference and difficult to maintain. I'll have to think about it once I get more familiar with the subreddit. Thank you for pointing this out.

r/weightroom tends to higher quality than r/fitness

> r/weightroom tends to higher quality than r/fitness

Causation or correlation?

The inspiration's only skin deep. No discussion functionality and most importantly, doesn't work without javascript.

Yeah, but nowadays what doesn't work without javascript...

Such a simple site should work without. It's basically a list of links.

Depends on the demographic. I don’t know that we can say what it should or shouldn’t do without data. Why should it work without JS

Even the new (2018+) version of Reddit displays content without requiring JS.

Pagination is only broken because the returned HTML doesn't have prev/next links, but they could be trivially added (and hidden when JS is on).

Lots of things don't work without javascript (I assume you meant to ask what does work without javascript), but HN, for example, does work without javascript.

No discussion is a big negative for me

I agree with this comment. I would personally very much like to see some talk about given links. However, I believe it would decrease the quality down. Yes, Hackernews has this; but there are really well-informed people here and active. It is not the same with fitness world.

Why do you say there are no well informed people in the fitness world?

If you go over to /r/fitness there are some active and well informed people, so I'd have to disagree with you.

My apologies for the confusion ans the fact I wasn't clear enough with what I meant with inspiration. In the sport/ gym world a large majority of the articles are superficial and try to lure you in with click bait titles. For me (with a not as deep knowledge and background in software as the community here which is abundantly clear) I am a long time HN lurker because of the fact it goes against this. Against the instant gratification and towards quality content. Thanks for your feedback!

I know you posted them all, but the articles on there are exactly the kind I’d like to see as a user of HN. Looking forward to seeing a comment feature in the future if possible.

I think you meant least importantly.

HN is "good" (debatable) because it's backed by Y Combinator. The tech involved is the bare minimum needed to solve the problem, and isn't a good model for "how to successfully build and run a community".

Without the support of some of the most powerful people in SV, and the people who follow those people, this site ceases to exist, and quickly.

Replicating HN's simplicity/tech stack is like painting stripes on your Civic because the F1 car you like has them.

Yes. What makes HN good is not the code but the community behind it, both commenters and contributors.

Only a very small subset of contributors even make this debatable, it's not the community at large.

why not r/fitness. These kind of crowd sourced websites require a lot of people to use it. last i checked r/fitness has millions of subscribers.

Poor signal:noise ratio, IMO.

Fantastic! I already saw some interesting articles. In fact science is greatly needed in this area, where there's less of a scientific focus on a lot of popular media sites on the topic. I end up personally learning a lot more actual SCIENCE from YouTube sites such as FitnessFAQ's and Calisthenics Movement than fitness websites with articles. I've spent ages understanding pathologies I've had, upper trap pain and elbow pain, and recently made some inroads.

Question - where's the comment section? HN's commenting quality and mechanisms are why it's so much above Reddit intellectually.

I've found a lot of high quality discussions at reddit.com/weightroom

Page doesn't exist. Can't figure out if this is sarcasm or what

reddit.com/r/weightroom - does exist and is good!

Woops, forgot the /r/, thanks!

weightroom is, in my opinion, one of the best resources for strength athletes right now. just keep in mind that it has its own peculiar nature and rules; if you're a newcomer, keep your contribution to the daily thread until you learn the rules.

it's more in the style of askhistorians; so strictly moderated and low-effort comments are generally not tolerated except for the daily thread, which is fun.

All I see is the loading icon.. seems like their Firebase quota exhausted https://imgur.com/a/LwBdMfi

I think this is a great idea - only thing missing is the thing that makes HN HN: discussions! Without that it seems just like an RSS feed. Also, groupings like Ask HN or Show HN. A lot of fitness/nutrition stuff is controversial and the discussions help separate the chaff.

The design is good enough... I guess it's not optimized but it's by no means a deal-breaker. I'm sure it can be optimized as you go.

Cholesterol article fails to mention how the USDA softened its dietary guidelines in 2015 with regard to cholesterol. There is no longer a recommended maximum intake limit. The exact wording: "Adequate evidence is not available for a quantitative limit for dietary cholesterol specific to the Dietary Guidelines." There is still bullshit about limiting dietary cholesterol though; they are waffling on the issue.

I'm very interested! Hopefully it is going to live and get regular updates.

Nevertheless the HN UI feels better. And where are the discussions on SN?

"Commenting is definitely the next functionality we are going to add."

Thanks. Excuse me. But comments are a very important part of the concept - discussions happen to be incredibly interesting on HN, it feels like I've probably learnt more useful stuff from the comments than from the actual news here.

If you like HN, why not use it? This purports to be a mirror of the source (I don’t see an original repo): https://github.com/wting/hackernews

This seems more reddit-inspired than HN-inspired. That said, looks nice and clean, there is less clutter than reddit. So overall, its pretty good.

Once you add comments and an "Ask" section like on HN, it would be a good replacement for r/fitness.

I like the idea, but it doesn't load any content for me at all:

    Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://firestore.googleapis.com/google.firestore.v1beta1.Firestore/Listen/channel?database=projects%2Fstrengthnews-e5a40%2Fdatabases%2F(default)&gsessionid=IUYyH6STWlLOBBqfQH-UNwlTGZZIplrA&VER=8&RID=rpc&SID=g__62zvCW3XsnHmxGIGKrw&CI=0&AID=0&TYPE=xmlhttp&zx=a2tcqj79gmaw&t=1. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed).
    @firebase/firestore: Firestore (5.5.9): Could not reach Cloud Firestore backend. Backend didn't respond within 10 seconds.
    This typically indicates that your device does not have a healthy Internet connection at the moment. The client will operate in offline mode until it is able to successfully connect to the backend.

There is a fitness related website I used to read a lot - http://www.ergo-log.com/

You can post some stuff from there while more people haven't shown up.

Nice work. Excited to see where you take it!

Related: very happy to see that https://forum.bodybuilding.com/ is still around/thriving.

Hey pretty nice, cool idea.

I'm wondering how you got your initial users? I've had similar ideas but a site like this is kinda useless without content, and without content, nobody will read it/post. Catch-22, etc.

Love it - good work. For me, this will serve as a nice shift from YT fitness content to more written content. I like the idea of creating community around it, whereas YT or IG is more transient.

I love it! Top post on eggs is exactly the kind of content I was hoping for.

I’m sure you plan on adding comments. I will be a regular user and I’ve already shared with a few friends and family.

All these toxic comments are the reason that i don't have the courage to engage and post more links here.

Website doesn't load, all I see is in the console:

> Unhandled Promise Rejection: FirebaseError: Quota exceeded.

I bounced from the site before it loaded. Don't have time for such a slow site, sorry.