Hacker News Reader

Comment by brettermeier | Hacker News Reader

While I try reading this, the site loads something and scrolls to the top of the page, even on 2. try. Who designed this? This page sucks.

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Yikes, I'm the founder of this company (one of my colleagues wrote this piece) - just saw it appear here. We shipped a rather huge change to the website recently (we're trying to let other people post stuff too), think we accidentally made it janky and missed this. Will fix when the right person wakes up - he's west coast US! Sorry for QA via HN :)

FWIW, fully a quarter of the screen is taken up by fixed position elements that are entirely irrelevant to a reader. When I see this on sites I want or have to use, I add cosmetic rules to delete the sticky elements. When I see it on sites I don't have to use, I close the tab.

I don't claim that this makes it a net loss for you from a money standpoint, nor that I'm representative of a majority of your market, but I _do_ suspect I'm the sort of potential customer that isn't easily studied in an A/B test.

Cheers!

I didn't see that until I enabled JS on the page. Just sayin',

I use a hide sticky extension / web script, works great for removing all this sticky header garbage so that I can actually read the content.

If you're talking about that obnoxious left sidebar, I agree. The table of contents widget on the right too. The article itself is squeezed between a bunch of shit I don't want to look at. It makes the page feel crowded and like it's trying to get me. Please just let us read the content! If it's any good, it'll speak for itself.

Where do you host this site? It's freaking fast.

Seems to be Vercel / Next.js (I'm not affiliated, only did an IP lookup because I was curious)

Looks good to me using Firefox for Android, but I tried Chrome and there it looks a bit weird.

Perhaps it's time for a "Best viewed on Firefox" button?

Can confirm this. When scrolling down to about half-way through the article it jumps back up. It appears to happen when the blog list on the left is loaded (which takes like 5 seconds to load).

I can see why the dev didn't notice this when debugging locally, as there it probably loads the left menu without delay.

Disable JS & it works lovely. Not the first time I've found blocking JS has unborked a borked web page either.

@james_impliu: I like simple text websites. Why do web devs love making simple things complex?

Because most new web devs have simply never made a html page served on apache before.

It's mind-blowing but a lot of people think react, nextjs and vercel (to pick a random provider) is the only way to make web apps.

It's not the only way of course, but as someone who's made pure HTML pages served on Apache or nginx, React and NextJS sure are nice to have.

The importance of and consequences of not dogfooding

MacOS Firefox fine.

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