Hacker News Reader

Comment by Carpetsmoker | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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!

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...

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 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.