Show HN: Hacker News 2 - A HN clone built on Node.js, Backbone, and MongoDB | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hacker News 2 - A HN clone built on Node.js, Backbone, and MongoDB

hackernewstwo.com

23 pointsmappum22 comments

I am sorry, But I don't find it better than HN in anyway. Two main reasons why:

1. Too much noise, real strain to focus on each title. The reason why I say that the thumbnails as noise is because it is in no way helping me to decide whether to read an article or not. The only reason I choose an article to read is the title so anything else is mere distraction.

2. Due to the first reason,Skimming is not as easy as the original HN, which is important for all of us here.

But let this not discourage you in anyway. The good thing from what I can see from your work is, you know what you want and you know how to do it.

Thinking of an application based on this UI that you have designed might be browsing pictures in reddit.com/r/pics or imgur. Here the thumbnails of the image at the back will not be a noise, but a useful info to decide on whether to look at the picture or not.

Most of the month (all but a few days) I've only got a 20 kbit/s connection. Let that sink in. Twenty. Kilobits. Per. Second. That's less than the voyager spacecraft (but probably a better ping).

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The front page of Hacker News is 27.75KB and 7 requests.

Hacker News Two is in comparison 2.07MB and 60 requests.

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Hacker News loads in 2.26 seconds.

Hacker New Two loads in 2.5 minutes.

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I'm an edge case. Of all the users on Hacker News, only a handful are on sub-dial-up connections, but does all the added stuff really add so much to a website like Hacker News?

I know this is somewhat off topic, but could you talk a little about your browsing habits? I'm curious as a web developer who's never had less than 50 kbit/s and that was when I was 6 or 7.

I'd like to know which sites you find useful with the speeds you have (Hacker News, Reddit, SSL enabled sites, etc)?

On topic, I'd like to say that your I'm sorry for your speed, but it has no relevance for this app at the moment. Developers should push boundaries and try new things, and to cater to your speeds means doing nothing but simple simple stuff IMO.

I'd recommend building a mechanism that switches to the mobile site using a ping from the server based on response time for developers out there, and for you to either upgrade if you can, or to switch to mobile views as default (I know chrome can do this while in dev tools, but I haven't tested it while turning the dev tools off).

But seriously, I don't want to be a dick or seem agressive... but really? He's trying to do something cool. I'm sorry you can't see stuff like that, but accessibility means sacrifice almost always.

I'm sorry to rant but this is how bloat happens. HN2 offers no relevant information over the current HN and is almost a hundred times as big. People will probably throw more hardware at it just as you say. I always wonder why people are desperate to ruin their battery life with LTE when I used to surf the web on GPRS not long ago; then I realize how current websites work and I get it.

I take your point, it's not fair to say that a demo/example/app-in-development shouldn't be optimized for edge cases - no premature optimization and all that jazz.

I'm HenrikEnggaard on Twitter, PM me your email and I'll send my thoughts (I won't do it on Twitter as it's among the worst sites to use. The content is actually for a Work in Progress blog post). Or if you don't think it will mind anyone, I can post it here.

The worst part is, there's absolutely no reason for this design to require that much bloat. At all.

Absolutely love your stack and you should tell more about how you did and write a decent blog post.

And I like and appreciate the idea of improving HN: we all love HN, are addicted and know that there is room for improvement.

But did you make before you started to code any kind of design mockup? In Fireworks or Photoshop? And looked at it a few days? If not you should. It's tempting and often faster to hack and test layouts in Jade and Stylus (or HAML and SASS) but I made the experience that if doing a mockup in Fireworks and just watch and get used to it a few days you get a much better feeling of your product. After a few days you realize bad design choices, start to change and your design and UI slowly matures into something perfect. Usually this takes up to 7 to 14 days.

Current flaws:

- Headers much too small in relation to thumb size and overall layout

- I question the thumbs: do they really offer any benefit? HN articles are often more about text than great visuals and even if i's about images: you'd have just to take one dominating pic of the site and not the whole site

- Too low content density compared to HN

- When showing rankings a single column list always works better than a grid layout because the reader instantly gets who is on #1, #2, #3, etc.

I felt the same about the thumbnails. Then I checked out the new articles and could easily pick out the spam (Indian Party Wear Sarees in this case). I don't think it's so useful for the top articles since most are primarily textual but it brings out an interesting use case for unfiltered content.

Non-linear layouts (Facebook, Pinterest) are difficult to scan quickly, it requires a lot more concentration.

(I read an article about this property back when Timeline was introduced but I can't seem to find it now.)

I don't like it at all.

I have a fairly fast connection, but I live in Australia and latency is a real issue.

Hacker News loads pretty much instantly. This takes 6.78 seconds to start loading the links - even on a warm cache. Most of that time is spent waiting on a web socket. There's absolutely no reason in the world why a link aggregator needs web sockets.

> Most of that time is spent waiting on a web socket.

Is the delay after the header loaded caused by websockets? Is this always with websockets or are there ways to avoid delays?

It appears so. Open Chrome's Network Inspector and reload the page to see for yourself.

This could be resolved by sending the links in the HTML rather than pulling them down over the web socket

I live in Southern California, and this page was also quite slow.

I can see 18 headlines when I arrive at Hacker News. I can see 6 headlines when I arrive at Hacker News Two.

The headlines are obvious when I arrive at Hacker News. There is a lot of noise between me and the headlines when I arrive at Hacker News Two.

I am going to stick with the original.

On top of this, the eye tends to move from top left to bottom right. This grid layout forces the user to read left to right across the entire screen, drop down and start again in an unnatural way. The problem is amplified when scrolling.

I would suggest moving towards a standard top down list (ironically like the existing HN). I would avoid using screen grabs, as HN articles tend to be about written content.

This project is awesome mostly because you can see blogspam and linkbait immediately. There are some glitches of articles with no screenshots and the borders on images are HUGE. The github link really should open a new window as the socket connection can take a bit of time when you click back. A link to flag a post and endless scrolling/more would be great. I've used it for a few hours and I'm relieved it gets around the expired or missing link bug that HN suffers from.

Source code: https://github.com/mappum/hackernewstwo

It's very difficult to read or focus on anything in particular, or to skim through everything in general.

Not sure if it's me, but the different width sizes makes it messy and cumbersome to read. I think it would be a lot more organizes if there was some more order to this. Also, not quite sure what the orange bordered stories means.

That seemed to be the consensus, so I just gave them all the same width. Better?

Idk how to make it obvious, but grey is visited links, orange is unvisited.

Awful.

Firstly because it is not an "HN clone" at all but merely the front page.

Secondly, the thumbs are a terrible way to display HN content.

I don't find the screenshots useful at all.

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