Hacker News Reader

Comment by tasty_freeze | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic news for people, like me, who spend a lot of time with $10/GB hotspot data prices. I'd click a link to a 5KB news article only to find it streaming HD video of talking heads reading the article.

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With ublock origin you can block loading of media above a certain size.

You can pair that with addon called, "Image video block" https://github.com/tiborbarsi/image-video-block-browser-addo...

And finally, you can use Bandwidth hero to compress images on the fly. You need to host the server instance on Heroku. Their free tier should suffice

Niceee...As someone recently put in the same.position as OP is great to know there are options around. I almost dropped Mozilla for this autoplaying mute videos crap.

Or even worse (and anecdotally more common), a video that is hardly relevant or from a year-old story.

> 5KB news article

On what site do you find "5KB news articles"? Pretty much all news sites that I know of load a gigantic amount of useless and obnoxious JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. with or without video.

NPR + rejecting cookies under their GDPR scheme makes the page a dream.

Also note https://text.npr.org/

There is still a text only version of NPR that is exceptionally lightweight.

https://text.npr.org/

They probably thought they're pulling a number on GDPR compliance, but created the best news reading experience in process...

HN comments? It's as much "news" as the vast majority of major sites...

comments are a poor replacement for journalism.

But surprisingly better than what often passes for journalism.

There's CNN Lite as well. https://lite.cnn.com/en

I wish they would use more of that on mobile or even the old m.cnn.com. The more recent trend of "www-m.cnn.com" URLs is glacially slow, even when going through a Raspberry Pi.

I created https://legiblenews.com/ because of this frustration ... and took it all the way to the level where loading a page is exactly 1 request.

The other frustration I’ve had with news websites is they don’t link to source material, so it’s impossible to dig into a topic and accidentally learn something.

Cool site Brad.I havent heard of it.

I like the way you make the categories. Finally, someone calling a spade is a spade.

Eg. "Disasters and accidents" had disasters and accidents.

It did highlight how much of our news isn't the most uplifting of topics however.

I like it. However given your goal of delivering sane and lighweight news articles you might want to extend that mission to the selection of your sources and consider excluding some. For the Boris Johnson story you link to The Independent, which returns a 14 MB article (while autplaying is disabled in Firefox) and basically has become a collection of worst practices when it comes to user experience and web development. Surely there must be better sources for popular stories like these.

The data comes from [Wikipedia's Current Events portal][1], so the site's author isn't directly choosing those sources.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Nice!

This would be slightly more legible if there was a clearer distinction between the tags introducing each item and the text of the item itself.

Also, it would be more usable if the dates in the URLs were numeric and international-style (ISO-8601 / xkcd-1179).

But nice!

I haven't looked at the actual data, but if I go to cnn.com, which I visit routinely enough, I imagine most of the assets are already cached. The ads and embedded video, though, are a bandwidth sink.

Wikipedia Current Events portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events is 40K for me with cached data.

I think the point was the news article itself is only 5KB. The rest is website fluff.

Why are you spending so much? There are many ways to get bandwidth for less. AT&T Home Wireless (doesn't have to be used at home) is $1/GB. There are many resellers of unlimited hotspots. Sometimes deals come up, like Verizon's now discontinued prepaid unlimited hotspot for $65/m.

With rates like that I'm surprised you don't use NoScript with a whitelist.

unless you turn off images, sound and video and probably javascript, I'm afraid you're gonna have a bad time with that "5kb" news article.

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