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Comment by fanf2 | Hacker News Reader

» Performance is a feature.

So it takes several seconds of gratuitous jank to load the page? Really obnoxious first impression.

I mean that’s pretty brutal you have to admit! The animation obscure this somewhat though The HN api doesn’t allow for programmatically loading full chunks of stories, so one needs to use either lazy loading (I used intersection observers), or wait to load requests for N stories in parallel, which can be slow The janky approach loads information to the user as fast as possible and the animations I do make this constraint of the API seem intentional for artistic effect

Don't let these people fixated on Doherty Thresholds give you flack you have delivered on spec let the pedantic etymologists eschew obfuscation around how to define brutalism - you didnt invent the word but could quote from Cameron [1] "This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under construction."

By the way, aesthetics are a red herring -- the real brutality here is seeing HN as a naked text headline feed with no signal given on votes, comments, source, even date !!! My bet is it unnerves people who are used to clicking on a fuzzy measure of these things alone so deciding without them is too far out of a comfort zone. It provokes a visceral dread and gets taken out on response times, api calls, and vocabulary.

Stay Brutal! It Rocks !

[1] https://www.cameronsworld.net/

Love the link, thanks!

If you store the latest state on your server it would load instantly, and you would not be wasting electricity by repeating the work on all your users’ devices. Using artistic flourishes to cover up bad engineering is decidedly not brutal: brutalism is all about the engineering itself being the artistic flourish.

I mean doing it on a different server would just be useless, that’s what the original site already does. I’m also not really sure how this would work do to all of the cache invalidation issues that would occur as comments are added.I don’t really have the financial backing to run a real time in memory cache of all HN for free, which in effect is what HNs API already does. I recommend actually reading the docs on how their API works and it’s quirks. Besides the point, this wouldn’t be able to be hacked into 1 HTML file which I wanted to do for the challenge

Also, if my site is “wasting electricity” that means every other HN reader is too because that’s how their API works! This is by far the silliest comment I have received!

The whole point of this project is also that there is NOT a server, and the site I created functions as a mobile/tablet/desktop app too

See https://hckrnews.com/ for a working example

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