Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradgessler | Hacker News Reader

I always plug my news website, https://legiblenews.com/, when I read about the state of news on the web because I too feel this frustration. It got so bad I decided to create a news website that:

1. Loads in one request. Seriously, load it in your browser with the network inspector open. One request.

2. Is private. I don’t care who reads it. I provide this as a public service and have no interest in running targeted ads.

3. Links to source content. This is the worst thing about news websites today: the articles summarize complex issues and rarely link to source documents because they want to keep you on their website and pump you full of more ads. I joke that “you might accidentally learn something if you click one of the links” because it loads Wikipedia articles.

I get why people read paper news. It’s private, no pop-ups, and is fast. Legible News is as close as I could get to that. I hope you enjoy!

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I too thought about these issues. There are two major problems I see with news websites these days:

- facts mixed with opinions - cherry picked and maliciously re-ordered facts

The first one you seem to have taken care of

The second one I’m thinking of some solutions:

- random order (per visit) of news item on the page - each news item focuses on one information at the same time - each news item comes with “context”. This is the hard part because context can be cherry picked and ordered.

Do people read news about facts or opinions? I think the latter was actually more valuable. People follow their favourite columnists and reporters on papers because of their in-depth analysis and opinions on issues, rather than plain cold facts.

But that is a major problem right? You are consuming digested news that is obviously biased. There is no way of getting out of your bubble if you consume news like this.

There is a spectrum between difficult to consume raw news and completed digested news.

I read hacker news via someone here's project:

https://www.fullhn.com/

(I don't load the embedded third-party stuff)

I'm...I'm amazed. Holy flip. This IS the future we wanted!! This is incredible. I'm actually not even going to use hn anymore.

In fact I think this may be a hint at making better link aggregate sites in general!

Thanks, this looks great. I can only wish it had RSS.

Made one for myself: https://feed43.com/3068865104604836.xml

> Loads in one request. Seriously, load it in your browser with the network inspector open. One request.

And this matters... why?

I think it's about the principle of it, or for people who like well-designed, or at least sensibly-designed things. If I'm going to read short bit of text then surely one request is sufficient.

Do you browse the internet with the dev tools open to the network tab? Seems like a weird thing to obsess over, considering 99.9% of people won't even notice how many requests you have. Makes it a lot easier to build a UI from a RESTful API (meaning more reusable code). Obviously I'm not suggesting making 100 tracking requests, but just fetching data over multiple API calls? Why the hell not?

I like it but what's the editorial line ? Who choose and write the headlines ? Which country is that from ?

I like it! A bold or italic for the sub-heading would seal the deal for me. :)

The style is nice, but the choice of content is pretty limited. I'm missing a lot of important (IMHO) items. I do like the focus on some world affairs at least.

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